What was left on the moon by apollo 11

The current condition of these flags is a subject of speculation. Satellite imagery has apparently revealed at least some of the Apollo mission flags are still standing , although Buzz Aldrin said he saw the Apollo 11 flag knocked over by the blast from the landing module's engines as it took off.

More: 50 years later, the Apollo moon landing remains a shared experience that still unites us. Interestingly, it has been theorized that the flags left on the moon during the Apollo era have since faded to white under the harsh ultraviolet light from the sun. A collection of science experiments called the Early Apollo Scientific Experiment Package stayed on the lunar surface after the astronauts departed. One experiment measured the moon's seismic activity.

Another monitored the effects of lunar dust on other equipment. A third experiment, the only one from Apollo 11 that's still active, was the first portion of the Laser Ranging Retroreflector.

This is a series of special mirrors designed to reflect laser beams sent through large telescopes on Earth. Data from this experiment helps scientists measure the distance between the Earth and the moon, and track the moon's orbit.

Because the amount of weight the landing module could carry back was limited, Apollo 11 astronauts had to discard as much gear as they could to make room for samples. Some of the artefacts still serve a scientific purpose. Retroreflectors installed on the moon by the Apollo astronauts and the Lunokhod 1 and 2 missions have been used to measure the Earth-moon distance with laser beams for the past 50 years. Less enduring are the marks in the ground, the footprints first made 50 years ago.

This article is more than 2 years old. After 50 years of exploration, the lunar junkyard holds nearly tonnes of objects. The astronauts may have brought medals to commemorate dead Soviet cosmonauts. And they also brought a small gold olive branch, a millennia-old emblem of peace. Later Apollo missions weren't quite as straight-laced. Among the silliest items left on the lunar surface are three golf balls , which Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard swung across the moon. But it was also a little bit playful.

Another astronaut was inspired to leave his trace in a very different way: during Apollo 16 , Charlie Duke left a signed photograph of his family tucked in a plastic sleeve on the moon's surface. But a future moon explorer will likely never see the faces of the Duke family, she said. Even on Earth, photographs fade to blue under ultraviolet light, and there's much more of that light on the moon — not to mention a steady hail of micrometeorites that could destroy the print.

All of these objects were extras, so to speak, not part of the Apollo necessities. The astronauts left many objects behind out of necessity. For O'Leary, one of the most compelling moments of Apollo 11 came when Armstrong and Aldrin were preparing to return home. The Apollo 11 crew and their successors created an archaeological site the same way humans have done for millennia, Gorman said, and the same process of looking through waste that has led to a better understanding of our past here on Earth can also help us understand the moon missions.

The excess weight jettisoned before leaving the moon included some objects that were crucial to the Apollo 11 mission but had outlived their usefulness. During the Apollo era, data were housed at the individual labs of scientists. Many measurements were never properly archived. The researchers tracked down tapes held in an archive in Maryland. But those covered only about three months of observations.

These had been archived at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. The surface was still slowly warming when data collection ended. In search of a heat source, the researchers turned to pictures taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. This spacecraft has been orbiting the moon since Its images showed that soil stirred up by astronauts was slightly darker than other lunar terrain. Perhaps it was dark enough to absorb more sunlight and warm the ground below.

And the extra heat slowly spread more than a meter 3 feet into the ground. That caused the warming detected by Apollo instruments. Turns out those footsteps had left marks on the moon far deeper than those iconic boot prints.

Nagihara and other researchers dig up and analyze old Apollo data. It relies on those special mirrors that astronauts placed on the moon by astronauts on the Apollo 11, 14 and 15 missions. When light hits the corner, it will always reflect in the exact direction from which it came. Researchers shoot a laser beam at these mirrors from a telescope on Earth.

They then clock the time it takes for the light to return. These measurements have offered several insights. For instance, they showed the moon is moving away from Earth at about 3. Physicist Tom Murphy is using the mirrors to answer a question much bigger than the moon. That equivalence principle states that any two objects in the same field of gravity should fall at the same rate. A bowling ball and a ping-pong ball should hit the ground at the same time at least if they fall in a vacuum.

And the Earth and moon should orbit around the sun at exactly the same rate. If the orbital rate breaks with this principle, that would reveal a flaw in the theory.