On February 5, 1971, people successfully landed on the Moon for the third time as part of the Apollo 14 mission.
Astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell spent a total of 33 and a half hours on the moon, performing two ‘Moonwalks’ during their stay. Fifty years later, data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recreates what it was like to walk across the lunar surface during one of their mile-long hikes – and a critical mistake.
NASA released the video Monday, recreating the Apollo 14 astronauts’ two-and-a-half-hour hike across the Moon. But the historic walk had a surprising ending: the two astronauts missed their true destination.
Watch the video in full:
Shepard and Mitchell end up between the Doublet and Triplet craters, in the hilly highlands of the Fra Mauro crater. The site is approximately 110 kilometers east of the Apollo 12 landing site.
The couple’s first extra vehicle activity lasted about four hours and 49 minutes, during which they used the Apollo Lunar Surface Scientific Experiments Package.
For their second activity, the astronauts made a hike to Cone Crater, a small crater in the Fra Mauro region of the Moon. The Fra Mauro area consists of rocks ejected and placed during the asteroid impact that formed the Imbrium – the second largest and one of the youngest impact basins on the moon.
Cone Crater was located about 300 feet above the landing site. Maybe you do not think far? But on the moon, everything gets a lot more complicated.
As the video shows, Shepard and Mitchell began their walk to the crater on course and walked two and a half hours across the lunar surface. They followed a path that took them over a fairly steep hill to the edge of the crater, as illustrated in the video. As they walked, the astronauts also had to tow a two-wheeled vehicle to carry their equipment. During the time they spent on the Moon, astronauts Shepard and Mitchell collected 94 pounds of rocks and earth to return to Earth.
But as the trail continues, the edge of the Cone Crater is obscured and slips out of the astronaut’s view. The mission eventually advised the couple to return to the lunar module for fear of getting lost. Before returning, however, they collected moon samples from an area near the crater.
In fact very, very close.
Amazingly, Shepard and Mitchell were fair 150 feet away from their destination Cone Crater at the moment they tracked it down.
Despite this apparent failure, the Apollo 14 astronauts set a new record for the total amount of time spent on the lunar surface. In total, they spent nine hours and 24 minutes on the Moon outside their spacecraft. During that time, they traveled a record distance of 9,000 feet on the Moon.