This is an accepted version of this page
47-658: Lunar Module Eagle ( LM-5 ) is the spacecraft that served as the crewed lunar lander of Apollo 11 , which was the first mission to land humans on the Moon . It was named after the bald eagle , which was featured prominently on the mission insignia . It flew from Earth to lunar orbit on the command module Columbia , and then was flown to the Moon on July 20, 1969, by astronaut Neil Armstrong with navigational assistance from Buzz Aldrin . Eagle ' s landing created Tranquility Base , named by Armstrong and Aldrin and first announced upon
94-572: A Vernier engine erosion experiment. Virtually identical to Surveyor 5, this spacecraft carried a television camera, a small bar magnet attached to one footpad, and an alpha-scattering instrument as well as the necessary engineering equipment. It landed on November 10, 1967, in Sinus Medii, 0.49 deg in latitude and 1.40 deg w longitude ( selenographic coordinates )–the center of the Moon's visible hemisphere. The spacecraft accomplished all planned objectives. The successful completion of this mission satisfied
141-437: A bandwidth of 1.2 kHz. Most transmissions consisted of the 600 line pictures, which were telemetered by a directional antenna . The frames were scanned each 3.6 seconds. Each frame required nominally one second to be read from the vidicon and utilized a 220 kHz bandwidth for transmission. The optical surfaces were the cleanest of any mission because of a redesigned mirror hood. The television images were displayed on
188-417: A partial success occurs when a spacecraft lands intact on the Moon but its in-situ operations is compromised as a result of the landing process for any reason. Landing on any Solar System body comes with challenges unique to that body. The Moon has relatively high gravity compared to that of asteroids or comets—and some other planetary satellites —and no significant atmosphere. Practically, this means that
235-444: A vidicon tube, 25 and 100 mm focal length lenses, shutters , polarizing filters (as opposed to color filters used on the previous Surveyor cameras), and iris mounted nearly vertically and surmounted by a mirror that could be adjusted by stepping motors to move in both azimuth and elevation. The polarizing filters served as analyzers for the detection of measurement of the linearly polarized component of light scattered from
282-420: A 100 mm (3.94 in) diameter opening in the bottom of the instrument where the sample was located and two parallel but independent charged particle detector systems. One system, containing two sensors, detected the energy spectra of the alpha particles scattered from the lunar surface, and the other, containing four sensors, detected energy spectra of the protons produced via reactions (alpha and protons) in
329-450: A brief hop on 3 September 2023 to test technologies required for Indian lunar sample return mission called Chandrayaan-4 . Japan's ispace (not to be confused with China's i-Space ) attempted a lunar soft-landing by its Hakuto-R Mission 1 robotic lander on 25 April 2023. The attempt was unsuccessful and the lander crashed into the lunar surface. The company has plans for another landing attempt in 2024. Russia's Luna-Glob program,
376-401: A much stricter range of between −40 and 50 °C (−40 and 122 °F), and human comfort requires a range of 20 to 24 °C (68 to 75 °F). This means that the lander must cool and heat its instruments or crew compartment. The length of the lunar night makes it difficult to use solar electric power to heat the instruments, and nuclear heaters are often used. Achieving a soft landing
423-548: A seventh lunar landing attempt by the Apollo program was aborted when Apollo 13 's service module suffered explosive venting from its oxygen tanks. The LK lunar module was the lunar lander developed by the Soviet Union as a part of several Soviet crewed lunar programs . Several LK lunar modules were flown without crew in low Earth orbit , but the LK lunar module never flew to the Moon, as
470-424: A similar method. Airbag methods are not typical. For example, NASA's Surveyor 1 probe, launched around the same time as Luna 9, did not use an airbag for final touchdown. Instead, after it arrested its velocity at an altitude of 3.4m it simply fell to the lunar surface. To accommodate the fall the spacecraft was equipped with crushable components that would soften the blow and keep the payload safe. More recently,
517-406: A slow scan monitor coated with a long persistence phosphor . The persistence was selected to optimally match the nominal maximum frame rate. One frame of TV identification was received for each incoming TV frame and was displayed in real time at a rate compatible with that of the incoming image. These data were recorded on a video magnetic tape recorder and on 70 mm film. The camera performance
SECTION 10
#1732855591730564-482: Is in contrast to a small asteroid, in which "landing" is more often called "docking" and is a matter of rendezvous and matching velocity more than slowing a rapid descent. Since rocketry is used for descent and landing, the Moon's gravity necessitates the use of more fuel than is needed for asteroid landing. Indeed, one of the central design constraints for the Apollo program's Moon landing was mass (as more mass requires more fuel to land) required to land and take off from
611-428: Is the overarching goal of any lunar lander, and distinguishes landers from impactors, which were the first type of spacecraft to reach the surface of the Moon. All lunar landers require rocket engines for descent. Orbital speed around the Moon can, depending on altitude, exceed 1500 m/s. Spacecraft on impact trajectories can have speeds well in excess of that. In the vacuum the only way to decelerate from that speed
658-401: Is to use a rocket engine. The stages of landing can include: Lunar landings typically end with the engine shutting down when the lander is several feet above the lunar surface. The idea is that engine exhaust and lunar regolith can cause problems if they were to be kicked back from the surface to the spacecraft, and thus the engines cut off just before touchdown. Engineers must ensure that
705-464: The United States' Apollo Program . Several robotic landers have reached the surface, and some have returned samples to Earth. The design requirements for these landers depend on factors imposed by the payload , flight rate, propulsive requirements, and configuration constraints. Other important design factors include overall energy requirements, mission duration, the type of mission operations on
752-602: The 5th country to soft land on the moon. In January 2024, the first mission of the NASA-funded CLPS program, Peregrine Mission One , suffered a fuel leak several hours after launch, resulting in losing the ability to maintain attitude control and charge its battery, thereby preventing it from reaching lunar orbit and precluding a landing attempt. The probe subsequently burnt up in Earth's atmosphere. The second CLPS probe Odysseus landed successfully on 22 February 2024 on
799-474: The 67-inch (170 cm) probes touched the surface. During Apollo 11 Neil Armstrong however touched down very gently by firing the engine until touchdown; some later crews shut down the engine before touchdown and felt noticeable bumps on landing, with greater compression of the landing struts. Surveyor 6 Surveyor 6 is the sixth lunar lander of the American uncrewed Surveyor program that reached
846-568: The Chinese Chang'e 3 lander used a similar technique, falling 4m after its engine shut down. Perhaps the most famous lunar landers, those of the Apollo Program , were robust enough to handle the drop once their contact probes detected that landing was imminent. The landing gear was designed to withstand landings with engine cut-out at up to 10 feet (3.0 m) of height, though it was intended for descent engine shutdown to commence when one of
893-628: The LM and separated it from Command Module Columbia . Eagle was landed at 20:17:40 UTC on July 20, 1969, with 216 pounds (98 kg) of usable fuel remaining. After the lunar surface operations, Armstrong and Aldrin returned to the Lunar Module Eagle on July 21, 1969. At 17:54:00 UTC, they lifted off in Eagle 's ascent stage to rejoin Michael Collins aboard Columbia in lunar orbit. After
940-518: The Moon, marking the United States' first unmanned lunar soft-landing in over 50 years. This mission is the first private -NASA partnership to land on the Moon and the first landing using cryogenic propellants . However, the mission experienced some anomalies, including tipping-over on one side on the lunar surface; an off-nominal initial lunar orbit, a non-functioning landing LIDAR instrument, and apparently low communication bandwidth . Later it
987-399: The Moon. The lunar thermal environment is influenced by the length of the lunar day. Temperatures can swing between approximately −250 to 120 °C (−418.0 to 248.0 °F) (lunar night to lunar day). These extremes occur for fourteen Earth days each, so thermal control systems must be designed to handle long periods of extreme cold or heat. Most spacecraft instruments must be kept within
SECTION 20
#17328555917301034-557: The South pole-Aitken basin on the lunar far side at 22:23 UTC on 1 June 2024. After the completion of sample collection and the placement of the sample on the ascender by the probe's robotic drill and robotic arm, the ascender successfully took off from atop the lander portion of the probe at 23:38 UTC on 3 June 2024. The ascender docked with the Chang'e 6 service module (the orbiter) in lunar orbit at 06:48 UTC on 6 June 2024 and subsequently completed
1081-588: The Surveyor program's obligation to the Apollo project. On November 24, 1967, the spacecraft was shut down for the two-week lunar night. Contact was made on December 14, 1967, but no useful data was obtained. Lunar soil surveys were completed using photographic and alpha particle backscattering methods. A similar instrument, the APXS , was used onboard several Mars missions. In a further test of space technology, Surveyor 6's engines were restarted and burned for 2.5 seconds in
1128-415: The atmospheres of the bodies on which they landed to slow their descent using parachutes, reducing the amount of fuel they were required to carry. This in turn allowed larger payloads to be landed on these bodies for a given amount of fuel. For example, the 900-kg Curiosity rover was landed on Mars by a craft having a mass (at the time of Mars atmospheric entry) of 2400 kg, of which only 390 kg
1175-473: The attempt failed. As of 2023, SpaceIL has plans for another soft-landing attempt using a follow-up robotic lander named Beresheet 2 . India's Chandrayaan Programme conducted an unsuccessful robotic lunar soft-landing attempt on 6 September 2019 as part of its Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft with the lander crashing on the Moon's surface. On 23 August 2023, the program's follow-up Chandrayaan-3 lander achieved India's first robotic soft-landing and later conducted
1222-565: The crew re-boarded Columbia , the Eagle was abandoned in lunar orbit. The location of its impact on the Moon's surface during an orbit decay is unknown, and there is evidence that Eagle may still be in orbit. Lunar lander A lunar lander or Moon lander is a spacecraft designed to land on the surface of the Moon . As of 2024, the Apollo Lunar Module is the only lunar lander to have ever been used in human spaceflight, completing six lunar landings from 1969 to 1972 during
1269-644: The development of the N1 Rocket Launch Vehicle required for the lunar flight suffered setbacks (including several launch failures), and after the first human Moon landings were achieved by the United States , the Soviet Union cancelled both the N1 Rocket and the LK Lunar Module programs without any further development. The Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (also known as the Chang'e project) includes robotic lander, rover, and sample-return components;
1316-473: The first lunar liftoff on November 17 at 10:32 UTC. This created 150 lbf (700 N) of thrust and lifted the vehicle 12 feet (4 m) from the lunar surface. After moving west eight feet, (2.5 m) the spacecraft once again successfully soft landed and continued functioning as designed. Surveyor 6 landed near the crash site of Surveyor 4 , which malfunctioned a few months earlier in July 1967. The TV camera consisted of
1363-500: The lunar surface, and life support system if crewed. The relatively high gravity (higher than all known asteroids, but lower than all Solar System planets) and lack of lunar atmosphere negates the use of aerobraking , so a lander must use propulsion to decelerate and achieve a soft landing . The Luna program was a series of robotic impactors, flybys, orbiters, and landers flown by the Soviet Union between 1958 and 1976. Luna 9
1410-559: The lunar surface. An auxiliary mirror was used for viewing the lunar surface beneath the spacecraft. The frame by frame coverage of the lunar surface provided a 360 deg azimuth view and an elevation view from approximately +90 deg above the plane normal to the camera z axis to −60 deg below this same plane. Both 600 line and 200 line modes of operation were used. The 200 line mode transmitted over an omnidirectional antenna and scanned one frame each 61.8 seconds. A complete video transmission of each 200 line picture required 20 seconds and utilized
1457-431: The main aim of its mission. China launched Chang'e 6 from China's Hainan Island on 3 May 2024; this mission seeks to conduct the first lunar sample return from the far side of the Moon . This is China's second lunar sample return mission, the first was successfully completed by Chang'e 5 when it returned 1.731 kg of lunar near side material to the Earth on 16 December 2020. The Chang'e 6 lander successfully landed in
Lunar Module Eagle - Misplaced Pages Continue
1504-440: The module's touchdown. The name of the craft gave rise to the phrase "The Eagle has landed", the words Armstrong said upon Eagle ' s touchdown. Eagle was launched with Command Module Columbia on July 16, 1969, atop a Saturn V launch vehicle from Launch Complex 39A , and entered Earth orbit 12 minutes later. Eagle entered lunar orbit on July 19, 1969. On July 20, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin entered into
1551-594: The only method of descent and landing that can provide sufficient thrust with current technology is based on chemical rockets . In addition, the Moon has a long solar day . Landers will be in direct sunlight for more than two weeks at a time, and then in complete darkness for another two weeks. This causes significant problems for thermal control. As of 2019, space probes have landed on all three bodies other than Earth that have solid surfaces and atmospheres thick enough to make aerobraking possible: Mars , Venus , and Saturn's moon Titan . These probes were able to leverage
1598-549: The program realized an initial successful lunar soft-landing with the Chang'e 3 spacecraft on 14 December 2013. As of 2023, the CLEP has achieved three successful soft-landings out of three landing attempts, namely Chang'e 3 , Chang'e 4 and Chang'e 5 . Chang'e 4 made history by making humanity's first ever soft-landing on the far side of the moon. Israel's SpaceIL attempted a robotic lunar landing by its Beresheet lander on 4 April 2019;
1645-413: The spacecraft 'hopping' maneuver on November 17, 1967, the sensor head was upside down. Measurements were continued in order to obtain information on solar protons and cosmic rays. Therefore, data for the purpose of the chemical analysis of lunar surface material were obtained only during the first 30 hours of operation. During this period, 27 hours and 44 min of data were known to be noise free. Surveyor 6
1692-665: The successor program to the Soviet Union's Luna program , launched the Luna 25 lunar lander on 10 August 2023; the probe's intended destination was near the lunar south pole, but on 19 August 2023 the lander crashed on the Moon's surface. Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon made a successful lunar landing with wrong attitude, bleak signal bandwidth and even after losing one of its engines during descent but within 100 m (330 ft) of its landing spot on 19 January 2024. It carried two small LEV rovers on board deployed sepqrately, just before SLIM's touchdown. It's landing made Japan
1739-418: The surface material. Each detector assembly was connected to a pulse height analyzer . A digital electronics package, located in a compartment on the spacecraft, continuously telemetered signals to Earth whenever the experiment was operating. The spectra contained quantitative information on all major elements in the samples except for hydrogen, helium, and lithium. Curium collected on the collimator films and
1786-475: The surface of the Moon . Surveyor 6 landed on the Sinus Medii . A total of 30,027 images were transmitted to Earth. This spacecraft is the fourth of the Surveyor series to successfully achieve a soft landing on the Moon, obtain post landing television pictures, determine the abundance of the chemical elements in the lunar soil, obtain touchdown dynamics data, obtain thermal and radar reflectivity data, and conduct
1833-466: The table; they are added as their initial robotic and/or crewed landers are launched from Earth. The term landing attempt as used here includes any mission that was launched with the intent to land on the Moon, including all missions which failed to reach lunar orbit for any reason. A landing attempt by a spacecraft is classified as full success if it lands intact on the Moon and is situated in its designed orientation/attitude and fully functional, while
1880-541: The transfer of the sample container to the Earth rentry module at 07:24 UTC on the same day. The orbiter then left lunar orbit on 20 June 2024 with the returner, which landed in Inner Mongolia on 25 June 2024, completing China's lunar far side sample return mission. The following table details the success rates of past and on-going lunar soft-landing attempts by robotic and crewed lunar-landing programs. Landing programs which have not launched any probes are not included in
1927-475: The vehicle is protected enough to ensure that the fall without thrust does not cause damage. The first soft lunar landing, performed by the Soviet Luna 9 probe, was achieved by first slowing the spacecraft to a suitable speed and altitude, then ejecting a payload containing the scientific experiments. The payload was stopped on the lunar surface using airbags, which provided cushioning as it fell. Luna 13 used
Lunar Module Eagle - Misplaced Pages Continue
1974-430: Was excellent in terms of both the quantity and quality of pictures. Between lunar landing, lunar 'second' landing, and the lunar first day sunset on November 24, 1967, 29,914 pictures were taken and transmitted. The alpha-scattering surface analyzer was designed to measure directly the abundances of the major elements of the lunar surface. The instrumentation consisted of an alpha source (curium 242) collimated to irradiate
2021-505: Was followed by four additional successful soft-landings, the last occurring on January 10, 1968. The Surveyor program achieved a total of five successful soft landings out of seven landing attempts through January 10, 1968. Surveyor 6 even did a brief hop off the lunar surface. The Apollo Lunar Module was the lunar lander for the United States' Apollo program . As of 2024, it is the only crewed lunar lander. The Apollo program completed six successful lunar soft-landings from 1969 until 1972;
2068-432: Was fuel. In comparison, the much lighter (292 kg) Surveyor 3 landed on the Moon in 1967 using nearly 700 kg of fuel. The lack of an atmosphere, however, removes the need for a Moon lander to have a heat shield and also allows aerodynamics to be disregarded when designing the craft. Although it has much less gravity than Earth, the Moon has sufficiently high gravity that descent must be slowed considerably. This
2115-404: Was revealed that, though it landed successfully, one of the lander's legs broke upon landing and it tilted up on other side, 18° due to landing on a slope, but the lander survived and payloads are functioning as expected. EagleCam was not ejected prior to landing. It was later ejected on 28 February but was partially failure as it returned all types of data, except post IM-1 landing images that were
2162-418: Was scattered by the gold plating on the inside bottom of the sensor head. This resulted in a gradually increasing background and reduction of the sensitivity technique for heavy elements. One proton detector was turned off during the second day of operation because of noise. A total of 43 hours of data was obtained from November 11 to 24, 1967. The final data was obtained 4 hours after local sunset. However, after
2209-529: Was the first spacecraft to achieve a soft landing on the Moon on February 3, 1966, after 11 unsuccessful attempts. Three Luna Spacecraft returned lunar soil samples to Earth from 1972 to 1976. Two other Luna spacecraft soft-landed the Lunokhod robotic lunar rover in 1970 and 1973. Luna achieved a total of seven successful soft-landings out of 27 landing attempts. The United States' Surveyor program first soft-landed Surveyor 1 on June 2, 1966, this initial success
#729270