Walk the Apollo landing sites

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1 / 17 Tranquility BaseYou stand on the Sea of Tranquility, a few steps from Eagle, at an eye height of 1.6 m. Walk with WASD or the arrow keys and press Space to jump. The Sun is low in the east, so every shadow points west.

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01
Tranquility Base
You stand on the Sea of Tranquility, a few steps from Eagle, at an eye height of 1.6 m. Walk with WASD or the arrow keys and press Space to jump. The Sun is low in the east, so every shadow points west.
02
What stayed behind
This is the site after liftoff. The descent stage is the lower half of Eagle, and it served as the launch pad for the cabin. The flag lies on the ground, as Aldrin saw it fall in the engine blast.
03
Flag and TV camera
The flag has a bar along its top edge so it stays open without any wind. Beyond it, about 18 m from Eagle, the TV camera stands on its tripod. Its cable runs back across the ground.
04
The two EASEP instruments
To the south are the seismometer with its solar panels and, a little closer, the laser retroreflector. The seismometer listened for moonquakes for three weeks, and the reflector is still used today.
05
A bootprint in the dust
The soil is a fine powder that keeps a sharp edge. Walking leaves darker trails, because the disturbed grains reflect less light. Trails like these still show up in images taken from orbit.
06
Little West crater
This crater is 33 m across and 4 m deep. Armstrong flew over it just before landing and ran over to look into it near the end of the moonwalk. It was the farthest either astronaut went.
07
A horizon 2.4 km away
Look west along the ground. On a ball of radius 1,737 km, an eye 1.6 m up sees the ground curve out of sight about 2.4 km away. On Earth the same eye sees about 4.5 km.
08
Earth in a black sky
Earth hangs about 66° up in the west and hardly moves across this sky. With no air to scatter sunlight, the sky stays black in full daylight. Faint stars are lost next to the bright ground.
09
Intrepid and Surveyor 3
Apollo 12 came down 163 m from a robot that had landed 31 months earlier. From the inner slope of Surveyor crater you see the lander with Intrepid on the rim behind it, as in the well-known photograph.
10
A golf shot at Fra Mauro
At Apollo 14 the TV camera stands just west of Antares. Shepard swung a six-iron here at the end of the second walk. One of the Challenges asks you to find the exact spot.
11
Almost at the rim of Cone
This is Station C1 with Saddle Rock beside it. The rim of Cone crater is only about 30 m further on, but the rolling ground hid it from the crew.
12
The first rover
At Apollo 15 the rover is parked about 90 m east of Falcon. Press Ride the rover (or R) to drive it. The speed slider sets the limit, and the run key gives the record 18 km/h.
13
Hadley Rille
From Station 9A you look across a channel more than a kilometre wide and about 300 m deep. Layers of lava show in the far wall.
14
North Ray crater
At Apollo 16 the crew drove 4.4 km north to stand on the rim of this crater, about 1 km across. House Rock sits on its rim a few hundred metres east.
15
Orange soil at Shorty
At Apollo 17, Schmitt saw orange soil on the rim of Shorty crater. It turned out to be volcanic glass beads about 3.6 billion years old.
16
Driving in one-sixth gravity
The last rover is parked here, about 145 m east of Challenger. Press Ride the rover (or R) and drive over a crater rim fast: all four wheels leave the ground, because the Moon pulls the rover down only one-sixth as hard as Earth would.
17
The last flag
Earth hangs about 54° up in the south-west over Taurus-Littrow. Cernan and Schmitt were the last people on the Moon, in December 1972.

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