Half a century ago, on July 21, 1969, the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, stepped onto the surface of the Moon for the first time in human history.
Before that, the Soviet, and American automatic stations flew to the Earth's satellite. Today, spacecraft continue to be sent to the Moon, but manned missions have ceased for many years.
Although the Moon is the nearest celestial body to us, we still don't know much about it. What has it been possible to learn about our nearest neighborhood by using The Soviet spacecraft and manned flights under the Apollo program, and why would mankind need the Moon? It would seem that unmanned vehicles can do everything a man can't do. They are more resistant to temperature changes, radiation and mechanical influences; for example, they can make heated vehicles, such as the Soviet moon rovers, which were heated by radioactive isotopes at night. They can be sent to place where people are in danger, such as deep tectonic faults, where darkness, very low temperatures, and extremely difficult conditions for descent and ascent are present. They can work on the surface of another planet for many years. But manned missions have one undeniable advantage. A man is more flexible than a machine: he is able to make non-standard decisions. An astronaut can see something unusual and react to it: take a picture, take a sample, collect data.
Although the landing on another celestial body is a historic event in itself, the first Apollo missions on the Moon were less scientifically effective than later missions.NASA was in a hurry in the struggle for space superiority.
Therefore, scientific instruments were introduced and improved gradually. The first travels on the Months first missions did not have lunomobilized vehicles, and astronauts walked short distances. In Apollo 14 (1972) a small trolley was provided for the transportation of scientific equipment. Dramatic mission "Apollo 13" (1970), during which there was an explosion aboard the ship, ended happily for the astronauts - they miraculously returned home, but fully to conduct scientific observations in such circumstances, they could not. Lunomobilized began to be used starting with the Apollo 15 mission (1971). They could travel several tens of kilometers.
But NASA understood that the lunomobil could break down, so they were sent nearby - so that astronauts could return to the descent vehicle in case of vehicle failure on foot.
The pilots who remained in orbit photographed the surface of the moon. Although the most detailed images were taken above the lunar module landing site, they were able to obtain many photographs of other locations, including the back of the satellite. Soviet automatic lunar rovers had a device to determine the elemental composition of the soil. In the U.S. manned missions.
This was not done, but simply samples were collected without prior analysis and sorting. The astronauts had at their disposal detailed surface images, and a good team of geologists who planned their routes. Sometimes it was not possible to reach the end of the route. Thus, the astronauts of Apollo 14 received a task to reach the shaft of the crater Cone (Cone), the diameter of which is 340 meters. Scientists wanted to get samples from the shaft of this crater. But the astronauts lost among the collapsed stones could not look inside the crater. Studying the composition of the MoonAlthough there was only one American astronaut in the Apollo program, the geologist Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, they were generally well-prepared.
They were driven to interesting places on Earth from the point of view of geology, gave lectures for them. This gave excellent results. Walking along the Moon Rain Sea, Commander Dave Scott of the Apollo 15 saw a white piece of a rock slightly larger than a fist. He remembered how they were told at the lecture there were more ancient rocks on the mainland than in the seas, among which there were white anorthosites. "This stone could have come here from the mainland," thought the astronaut and picked it up. The sample turned out to be very valuable. During the Apollo 17 mission, Harrison Schmitt and his partner Eugene Cernan noticed something reddish on the lunar surface. The unusual color of the breed attracted their attention, and they, not knowing what it was, took a sample. It turned out that this orange fine sand was the result of a pyroclastic volcanic eruption.
If a volcano erupts very intensely, with a lot of gas, the lava is not poured out, but beats with a fountain, and in flight its pieces solidify in the form of balls. Although the fact of the volcanic eruption on the Moon seemed strange, the samples themselves did not see anything special in that time. But decades later, in 2008, geologists and petrologists at Brown University found traces of water dissolved in volcanic glass in these pink samples. It turns out that the gas responsible for this eruption contained a lot of water. And where could it come from?