Good day.

We stand on the shoulders of giants. We have been going to space with missions for a few years now. Just looking at the Moon, we have seen a number of spacecraft head that way.

Googled a few links on Lunar and Planetary Flight Missions, and copied some below should you have an interest.


Thanks for looking up with me.

Larry Kellogg

Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
BlogSpot: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/
RSS link: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Newsltr.: https://news.altair.com/mailman/listinfo/lunar-update
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http://www.gl.ciw.edu/~huntress/Mission%20Histories.html
I have been a participant in robotic exploration of the solar system almost from its beginning in the 1960s. As a result, I have also become a student of its history, particularly of the Russian planetary exploration program--a mysterious backdrop to the U.S. program and its invisible competitor throughout the Cold War era.

History of Lunar and Planetary Flight Missions Download a timeline of lunar and planetary robotic flight missions:
Mission Timeline.xls
http://www.gl.ciw.edu/~huntress/Mission%20Histories_files/Mission%20Timeline.xls

Download a history of lunar and planetary robotic flight missions:
SSR Mission History.pdf
http://www.gl.ciw.edu/~huntress/Mission%20Histories_files/SSR%20Mission%20History.pdf

Made on a Mac

http://www.gl.ciw.edu/~huntress/Wes%20Huntress.html
Wes Huntress
Director, Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington ==============================================================
http://my.execpc.com/~culp/space/timeline.html
Time Line of Space Exploration

October 4, 1957 - Sputnik 1, the first man-made object to orbit the Earth, is launched by the U.S.S.R., and remains in orbit until January 4, 1958.
November 3, 1957 - Sputnik 2, carrying the dog Laika for 7 days in orbit, is launched by the U.S.S.R., and remains in orbit until April 13, 1958.
January 31, 1958 - Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite in orbit, lifts off at Cape Canaveral using a modified ABMA-JPL Jupiter-C rocket. It carries a scientific experiment of James A. Van Allen, and discovers the Earth's radiation belt.
March 5, 1958 - Explorer 2 is launched by a Jupiter-C rocket, and fails to reach orbit.
March 17, 1958 - Vanguard 1 satellite is launched into orbit, and continues to transmit for 3 years.
May 15, 1958 - Sputnik 3 is launched by the U.S.S.R.
October 1, 1958 - N.A.S.A. is founded, taking over existing National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics.
October 11, 1958 - Pioneer 1, U.S. - IGY space probe, launched to a height of 70,700 miles.
January 2, 1959 - Luna 1, first man-made satellite to orbit the sun, is launched by the U.S.S.R.
March 3, 1959 - Pioneer 4, fourth U.S.-IGY space probe was launched by a Juno II rocket, and achieved an earth-moon trajectory, passing within 37,000 miles of the moon. It then fell into a solar orbit, becoming the first U.S.
sun orbiter.
September 12, 1959 - Luna 2 is launched, impacting on the moon on September
13 carrying a copy of the Soviet coat of arms, and becoming the first man-made object to hit the moon.
October 4, 1959 - Luna 3 translunar satellite is launched, orbiting the moon and photographing 70 percent of the far side of the moon.
April 1, 1960 - Tiros 1, the first successful weather satellite, is launched by the U.S.
August 18, 1960 - Discoverer XIV launches the first U.S. camera-equipped Corona spy satellite. April 12, 1961 - Vostok 1 is launched by the U.S.S.R., carrying Cosmonaut Yuri A. Gargarin, the first man in space. He orbits the Earth once.
May 5, 1961 - Mercury Freedom 7 carries Alan B. Shepard,Jr., the first U.S.
Astronaut into space, in a suborbital flight.
August 6, 1961 - Vostok 2 is launched by the U.S.S.R., carrying Cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the first day-long Soviet space flight.
February 20, 1962 - Mercury Friendship 7 lifts off with John H. Glenn, Jr., the first American in orbit, and orbits the Earth three times.
May 24, 1962 - Mercury Aurora 7 is launched with M. Scott Carpenter, making three orbits.
July 10, 1962 - Telstar 1, U.S. satellite, beams the first live transatlantic telecast.
December 14, 1962 - U.S. Mariner 2, the first successful planetary spacecraft, flies past Venus, and enters a solar orbit.
June 16, 1963 - Vostok 6 carries Soviet Cosmonaut Valentia Tereshkova, the first woman in space and orbits the Earth 48 times.
June, 1963 - Martin Schmidt interprets the behavior of 3C 273 - the first known quasar.
July 31, 1964 - U.S. Ranger 7 relays the first close-range photographs of the Moon.
March 18, 1965 - The first space walk is made from Soviet Voskhod 2 by Cosmonaut Alexei A. Leonov. Duration is 12 minutes.
March 23, 1965 - First manned flight of the Gemini program, Gemini 3 carrying Virgil I. Grissom and John W. Young. Made three orbits around the earth.
March 24, 1965 - Ranger 9 transmits high-quality images of the moon, many of which were shown live in the first television spectacular about the moon.
June 3, 1965 - Edward White II makes the first U.S. space walk from Gemini 4. Duration is 22 minutes.
July 14, 1965 - U.S. Mariner 4 returns the first close-range images about Mars.
November 16, 1965 - Soviet Venus 3 is launched, becoming the first craft to impact Venus on March 1, 1966.
December 4, 1965 - Gemini 7 is launched carrying Frank Borman and James A.
Lovell, Jr., making 206 orbits around Earth and proving a trip to the Moon possible.
December 15, 1965 - American astronauts Walter Schirra, Jr. and Thomas Stafford in Gemini 6 make the first space rendezvous with Gemini 7.
February 3, 1966 - Soviet Luna 9 is the first spacecraft to soft-land on the moon.
March 1, 1966 - Soviet Venera 3 impacts on Venus, the first spacecraft to reach another planet. It fails to return data.
March, 1966 - Soviet Luna 10 is the first spacecraft to orbit the moon.
June 2, 1966 - Surveyor 1 is the first U.S. spacecraft to soft-land on the Moon.
August 14, 1966 - U.S. Lunar Orbiter 1 enters moon orbit, and takes the first picture of the Earth from the distance of the moon.
April 23, 1967 - Soviet Soyuz 1 is launched, carrying Vladimir M. Komarov.
On April 24 it crashed, killing Komarov, the first spaceflight fatality.
October 18, 1967 - Venera 4 sends a descent capsule into the Venusian atmosphere, returning data about its composition.
September 15, 1968 - Soviet Zond 5 is launched, the first spacecraft to orbit the Moon and return.
October 11, 1968 - Apollo 7 is the first manned Apollo mission with Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Donn F. Eisele, and Walter Cunningham. It orbited the earth once.
December 21, 1968 - Apollo 8 is launched with Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, Jr. and William A. Anders, the first Apollo to use the Saturn V rocket, and the first manned spacecraft to orbit the Moon, making 10 orbits on its 6-day mission.
January, 1969 - Soyuz 4 & 5 perform the first Soviet spaceship docking, transferring Cosmonauts between vehicles.
July 20, 1969 - Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, Jr. make the first manned soft landing on the Moon, and the first moonwalk, using Apollo 11.
July 31, 1969 - Mariner 6 returns high-resolution images of the Martian surface, concentrating on the equatorial region.
August 5, 1969 - Mariner 7 returns high-resolution images of the Martian surface, concentrating on the southern hemisphere.

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April 19, 2001 - Space Shuttle Endeavour lifts off for the ISS on a construction mission. The crew will install the mobile robotic arm on the station (Canadarm 2) and supply the Destiny laboratory module with new experiments, using the Rafaello logistics module.
April 28, 2001 - Soyuz spacecraft TM-32 lifts off for the ISS with the first space tourist, business executive Dennis Tito, who pays the Russians $20 million for the ride.
June 30, 2001 - NASA's Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) is launched on a trajectory for a gravity boost past the moon to a position 1.5 million km outside Earth's orbit. From that position it is to measure cosmic background radiation from the dark extragalactic sky.
July 12, 2001 - Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off in the pre-dawn darkness for the ISS with the Joint Airlock which will enable space walks to be performed directly from the space station itself (I am there to watch the launch!).
August 10, 2001 - Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off for the ISS with the Leonardo laboratory module and SimpleSat, an experimental low-cost astronomical telescope.
September 22, 2001 - Deep Space 1 successfully completes its flyby of comet 19P/Borrelly.
October 16, 2001 - Galileo completes another flyby of Jupiter's moon Io, passing only 181 km from Io's south polar region.
December 5, 2001 - Space Shuttle Endeavour is launched carrying the Raffaello logistics module back to the ISS with new supplies.

Questions

Your questions and comments regarding this page are welcome. You can e-mail Randy Culp for inquiries, suggestions, new ideas or just to chat.
Updated 22 March 2002

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http://moon.google.com/
Welcome to Google Moon

In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we've added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor. Happy lunar surfing. More about Google Moon

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http://kevinforsyth.net/detritus/
The Moon is a Junkyard: A Catalogue of Lunar Detritus Compiled by Kevin S. Forsyth

Luna - The Moon - represents a contradiction to a child of the Apollo era.
It seems to simultaneously embody both the old and the new. It is our most primeval heavenly body, an ancient rock embedded in the deepest lizard brain of the collective unconscious. But for more than forty years, it has also been the target of our most advanced scientific inquiry, and its face is littered with the remnants of high technology.

This page is an attempt to catalogue the dozens of sites where human-built hardware lies, intact or shattered, on the lunar surface. Primary source for these data is the NSSDC at Goddard Space Flight Center.

The site is most easily viewed in a full-screen, 1024x768 browser. Click on the small, colour-coded squares to learn about a landing or impact site, or use the list of sites link below the map. Photographs are links to captions and/or further information on each mission. Both near and far sides are listed.

As always, comments, questions, and especially corrections/additions are welcome. Kevin S. Forsyth

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http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/apollo.biblio.html
APPOLO LUNAR SURFACE JOURNAL
WWW Links and Bibliography
Last revised 26 May 2006

In addition to the web sites and books mentioned here, readers may want to consult a list of NASA History publications, several of which are now available on the World Wide Web. See, also, NASA Histories On-line and NASA History Office Interesting Aerospace History Links.

Sources of Apollo photos and videos are discussed in the Photos and Video chapter.

Web Sites of Interest

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http://home.hiwaay.net/~krcool/Astro/moon/moonmap/
Moon Maps & Sketches
[See tool bar at top of page for drop down box - LRK -]

A collection of maps and sketches showing lunar features, landing locations, impact locations, folklore outlines, antique drawings and various other lunar details. To view a map simply select from the drop down list above and click the "Display" button. The map will then appear in the current frame.
Below is a description of each map. Those sites denoted with an "L" are links to other web site. I've also included links to sites that contain moon maps and drawings.

NOTE: Some Maps Are Large In Size And Depending On Your Connection Speed Could Be Slow Loading...

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Copyright C 2002 By Keith Cooley - eMail:krcool@hiwaay.net - ==============================================================
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060819110802.htm
Source: European Space Agency
Date: August 19, 2006
European Moon Probe Finds Calcium On Lunar Surface

The D-CIXS instrument on ESA's Moon mission SMART-1 has produced the first detection from orbit of calcium on the lunar surface. By doing this, the instrument has taken a step towards answering the old question: did the Moon form from part of the Earth?

Scientists responsible for the D-CIXS instrument on SMART-1 are also announcing that they have detected aluminium, magnesium and silicon. "We have good maps of iron across the lunar surface. Now we can look forward to making maps of the other elements," says Manuel Grande of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth UK, and D-CIXS' Principal Investigator.

Knowing how to translate the D-CIXS orbital data into 'ground truth' has been helped by a cosmic coincidence. On 9 August 1976, the Russian spacecraft Luna 24 was launched. On 18 August it touched down in a region of the Moon known as Mare Crisium and returned a sample of the lunar soil to Earth.

In January 2005, SMART-1 was high above Mare Crisium when a giant explosion took place on the Sun. Scientists often dread these storms because they can damage spacecraft but, for the scientists responsible for D-CIXS, it was just what they needed.

The D-CIXS instrument depends on X-ray emission from the Sun to excite elements on the lunar surface, which then emit X-rays at characteristic wavelengths. D-CIXS collects these X-ray fingerprints and translates them into the abundance of each chemical element found on the surface of the Moon. Grande and his colleagues could relate the D-CIXS Mare Crisium results to the laboratory analysis of the Russian lunar samples.

They found that the calcium detected from orbit was in agreement with that found by Luna 24 on the surface of Mare Crisium. As SMART-1 flew on, it swept D-CIXS over the nearby highland regions. Calcium showed up here too, which was a surprise until the scientists looked at the data from another Russian moon mission, Luna 20. That lander had also found calcium back in the 1970s. This boosted the scientists' confidence in the D-CIXS results.

Ever since American astronauts brought back samples of moonrock during the Apollo Moon landings of the late 1960s/early 1970s, planetary scientists have been struck by the broad similarity of the moonrocks and the rocks found deep in the Earth, in a region known as the mantle. This boosted the theory that the Moon formed from debris left over after the Earth was struck a glancing blow by a Mars-sized planet.

However, the more scientists looked at the details of the moonrock, the more discrepancies they found between them and the earthrocks. Most importantly, the isotopes found in the moonrocks did not agree with those found on Earth.

"The get-out clause is that the rocks returned by the Apollo missions represent only highly specific areas on the lunar surface and so may not be representative of the lunar surface in its entirety," says Grande; hence the need for D-CIXS and its data.

By measuring the abundance of several elements across the lunar surface, scientists can better constrain the contribution of material from the young Earth and its possible impactor to condense and form the Moon. Current models suggest that more came from the impactor than from Earth. Models of the Moon's evolution and interior structure are necessary to translate the surface measurements into the Moon's bulk composition.

D-CIXS was a small experimental device, only about the size of a toaster.
ESA is now collaborating with India to fly an upgraded version on the Indian lunar probe Chandrayaan, due for launch in 2007-2008. It will map the chemistry of the lunar surface, including the other landing sites from where samples have been brought back to Earth. In this way it will show whether the Apollo and Russian landing sites were typical or special.

"From SMART-1 observations of previous landing sites we can compare orbital observations to the ground truth and expand from the local to global views of the Moon," says Bernard Foing, Project Scientist for SMART-1.

Then, perhaps planetary scientists can decide whether the Moon was indeed once part of the Earth.

The findings will appear in the Planetary and Space Science journal, in an article titled: "The D-CIXS X-ray spectrometer on the SMART-1 mission to the Moon - First Results", by M.Grande et al.
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http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/SMART-1/index.html
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM1RHBUQPE_Life_0.html
SMART-1 on the trail of the Moon's beginnings

18 August 2006
The D-CIXS instrument on ESA's Moon mission SMART-1 has produced the first detection from orbit of calcium on the lunar surface. By doing this, the instrument has taken a step towards answering the old question: did the Moon form from part of the Earth?

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http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/apollohoax.html
Bad Astronomy
Yes We Did Go To The Moon!

ALERT! This page is basically a list of links to websites that either support or refute the claim that NASA never sent men to the Moon. I have my own detailed rebuttal of the Fox television program ``Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land On The Moon?'' in my Bad TV section.

Sometimes, I think I have heard everything when it comes to Bad Astronomy.
Then something comes along so strikingly nuts that I have to wonder what still lies ahead!

In this case, the craziness involves people who think that the NASA Apollo Moon missions were faked. There are lots of rumors spreading around about this, and rest assured they are all completely false. The claims made by these conspiracy theorists are actually all wrong, and some are laughably so. Some involve some subtle (but understandable!) physics, while others are easily shown to be false.

I plan on having a thorough debunking of this on this site eventually. This is a large undertaking because of the sheer number of the claims, so I don't plan on having it done anytime soon. However, the number of emails I have received has prompted me to set up this page as a stopgap measure. Below are listed pages by both the conspiracy theorists and the debunkers. Although not every claim by the conspiracy theorists is covered by the debunkers, you'll see that many of their major claims are, making it pretty clear that the lesser claims are bogus too.

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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK

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