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A couple more fun facts about #Apollo11.
1. The famous boot print was a pre-planned science experiment. David Carrier recommended Buzz do it for a soil mechanics experiment. The vertical sidewalks and shiny flat surfaces proved the soil has high cohesion & lots of dust.
1. The famous boot print was a pre-planned science experiment. David Carrier recommended Buzz do it for a soil mechanics experiment. The vertical sidewalks and shiny flat surfaces proved the soil has high cohesion & lots of dust.
2. There actually is a crater in this picture under the engine nozzle, but it’s VERY shallow and it’s a ring, deepest ~1 meter away, less deep on the centerline. (In the lower right corner you see a 1 cm ridge stepping DOWNHILL away from the nozzle.) This was predicted. #Apollo11
3. The contact probe touched the surface when the Lunar Module footpads we’re still about 1 m up. Neil Armstrong was supposed to shut off the engine when it touched and freefall the last meter, but he chose not to. I can’t find the exact quote right now, but he said basically,...
(3 cont’d)...”They may have designed the vehicle that way, but that’s not how I’m going to fly it!”
(Maybe someone knows how to find the exact quote. I just scanned the flight crew flight debrief again but didn’t see it there.)
(Maybe someone knows how to find the exact quote. I just scanned the flight crew flight debrief again but didn’t see it there.)
4. Armstrong practiced jumping on the Moon: “I would say that balance was not difficult; however, I did some fairly high jumps and found that there was a tendency to tip over backward on a high jump. One time I came close to falling and decided that was enough of that.”
5. Aldrin tried to hammer the soil core tubes into the ground to collect samples of soil in a vertical column to 70 cm depth (28 inches). He couldn’t get them to go deeper than 5 or 6 inches. That regolith! They were redesigned every mission until at last they worked.
