Lunar Orbiter

index of sculptures 1988 to 2024

Lunar Orbiter

2006
Bas-relief in salvaged wood #31, 120 x 121 x 12cm.
Collection of Jeroen Princen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Apollo 11 bootprint (1969). photo by NASA.
‘One of the first steps taken on the Moon, this is an image of Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint from the Apollo 11 mission. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon on July 20, 1969.’
(source: grin.hq.nasa.gov/…GPN-2001-000014)

About Apollo 11

Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first humans to walk on the Moon in 1969. Much of the mission was broadcast live on television and was followed by millions at home. Apollo 11 launched from Cape Kennedy at 13:32:00 ut on July 16, 1969 and left Earth orbit after 2 hr and 33 minutes. They reached lunar orbit at 75 hr 50 minutes Ground-Elapsed-Time (GET). At 80:12 get, the service module propulsion system was fired to correct the orbit, each orbit now taking two hours. At 100:14 GET the Lunar Module was undocked after a full systems check. They fired the Lunar Module descent engine at 101:36 get and the ‘Eagle’ landed at 102:45 get.
The first action on landing was to prepare the Lunar Module for launch. They had a meal, but a scheduled nap was postponed at the astronauts’ request. At 109:24:19 GET Neil Armstrong took his first step on the moon. The astronauts then carried out their planned program of activities. They deployed the Solar-Wind- Composition experiment and collected a huge amount of lunar material. They took panoramic photographs of the region and closeups of lunar surface material. They deployed the Laser-Ranging-Retroreflector and the Passive-Seismic-Experiment-Package and collected two core-tube samples of the lunar surface. After about 2h 15mins of lunar surface activities the astronauts reentered the Lunar Module and took some sleep.
Ascent began at 124:22 GET after which they re-docked with the command spacecraft Columbia, which was piloted by the third member of the mission Michael Collins. Trans-earth coast needed only one of four planned midcourse corrections. The Command Module reentered the Earth’s atmosphere at a velocity of 36,194 feet per second (11,032 meters per second) and landed in the Pacific Ocean, where the astronauts were picked up by the recovery ship USS Hornet.
(source: NASA SP-214, Preliminary Science Report)