Activity 1
For thsi exercise you will need an image of the moon (You can get the image here). Do you think the image of the Moon contains any of the landing sites? Note the location of Tycho in both the map below and the image you have, then look at the mare that stretches up above it does the image go high enough?
Using the links below and the information on the last couple of pages write in your exercise book a short paragraph on one of the Apollo missions to the Moon.
You will soon be able to take pictures of the landing sites with the Bradford Robotic Telescope, try to trace the traverse routes taken by the astronauts in the Apollo missions or find the larger features of the landing sites. Check back soon for this update.
Click on the landing sites below to find more information on the missions.
Make a careful note of the scale of the traverse routes as the scale of your
photograph is around 1 pixel to 1 km. HINT: The later missions cover much
larger areas and the astronauts visited much bigger features.
Would it be possible to see any of the landing feature on your image?
Image taken by the NASA space probe Galileo as it passed our Moon on the way to Jupiter. Note the large crater at the bottom of the image with many lines running away from it, this is Tycho.
If you look at the Moon landing sites you should notice that they are all situated around the equator of the Moon this is due to the fact that when returning from the Moon its safest to do so from an equatorial orbit, as this minimises the chance of missing the Earth with the return shot.