July 28, 2009, 12:16 pm
“Both stayed close to the mound where the Eagle set down, except for Armstrong’s quick jaunt over to the rim of East Crater to shoot some photos of the outfield.”
By Henry Woodbury
To provide context for the first walks on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, NASA provides us with a map of the Sea of Tranquility superimposed over a baseball diamond. The Lunar Module is situated on the pitchers mound with the activity of the astronauts indicated as tan paths. This shows a blob of extensive activity around the module and a number of longer walks by each astronaut.
Created by Thomas Schwagmeier from a suggestion by Eric Jones, the map is part of the NASA Apollo 11 Image Library. To really appreciate the details (including a legible key), click through to the full size version.
What looks like the original for the overlay is Schwagmeier’s elegant rendition of the “Traverse Map” — Figure 3-16 from the Apollo 11 Preliminary Science Report. The two maps are shown side-by-side below. As with the baseball overlay, click through to the full size versions to see all the detail.
Comments
You might like to know that we also found a version of the same diagram but marked out against a UK soccer pitch. Since we work with the Second Life virtual world we then took that diagram into the world, exploded it to 1:1 scale, laid it out on a virtual moon, and then set sensors at each main camera and equipment position so that you could walk around the diagram and see the images from the places they were taken. There is a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qVvWOxzMDU.
Posted by David Burden on August 28, 2009 at 7:06 am
Very cool.
Posted by Henry on August 28, 2009 at 8:33 am