Imagine going to visit a place with spectacular geographical features like Niagara Falls or Grand Canyon. But the trick is that you have no map or equipment to tell you are there, so you just walk around rather unimpressive grounds and return home. Something similar happened to Apollo 14 astronauts on their moonwalk. The moon-walkers landed on the lunar surface on February 5, 1971. Astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell went on one of the most historic walks of human kind then. But new data released by NASA reveals how their path was led astray and they missed out on something incredibly beautiful.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of NASA is a robotic spacecraft that has been observing moon since 2009. Using it, the mile-long walk taken by the astronauts back in 1971 was recreated recently. The mission was to collect some moon rocks, disperse some seeds and visit the Cone crater. The last one never happened but if they look at this newly released video by NASA, they’ll realise how close they were to their destination.
They landed 110 miles east of the Apollo 12 landing site between the Doublet and Triplet craters; upwards of the Fra Mauro crater. Their Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA) or moonwalk was a mile long in length and over four hours long in time.
After deploying the lunar packages, the duo was supposed to hike to the Cone Crater. The video clearly marks the starting path and how they proceeded forward. They were going the right way, dragging a two-wheeled transporter to carry their equipment behind them.
Though their destination was only 300 feet away, traversing on moon might not be your regular walk in a walk experience. There’s no landmark, no experience, and definitely no google maps helping the astronauts to take a right turn.
They went ahead, following the predicted path as deigned in their map, but they never reach Cone. They looked around, their view partially obscured in the environment, but they never found the majestic crater. Bound by time, they had to end their EVA and return safely.
Now this video reveals they were actually just over 100 feet away from the rim of the crater!
Even if they missed it, they still created history by having the longest moonwalk by covering 9,000 feet on the Moon.