Reddit User Draws a Map of Moon Landings and They Are Closer Than You Think
A Reddit user called Famas Liberty recently posted a map showing every single Apollo moon landing in history. The points on the map are according to the coordinates of each landing, something he said, took some time.
“I know there already several of this kind online, but I wanted to do my own “mapping” of all the manned Apollo Landings. I also added the insignia for each mission, the year, and the landing zone’s name.
It was a challenge to pinpoint the exact spots, especially since NASA's map is with inverted colors,” he wrote on the thread.
The map he mentioned, is a more complicated version of Famas Liberty’s infographic. Probably the most curious aspect of this map is the landing site distances among the Apollo crafts.
Another commenter discovered a list of landing site distances, seen below.
A11 to A12 - 1426 km
A11 to A14 - 1248 km
A11 to A15 - 965 km
A11 to A16 - 379 km
A11 to A17 - 630 km
A12 to A14 - 181 km
A12 to A15 - 1188 km
A12 to A16 - 1187 km
A12 to A17 - 1758 km
A14 to A15 - 1095 km
A14 to A16 - 1007 km
A14 to A17 - 1607 km
A15 to A16 - 1119 km
A15 to A17 - 776 km
A16 to A17 - 995 km
These figures yield a few interesting coincidences, such as the Apollo 14 and Apollo 16 landings sites called, Fra Mauro and Descartes respectively, are both 541 km from the center point of the moon (zero degrees’ latitude and longitude). Also, Apollo 12 landed on Oceanus Procellarum 715 km from the center point while Apollo 11 touched down only 712 km from the same target, at Mare Tranquilitatis.
The Apollo Landings Theories
The Apollo landings have garnered a great deal of doubt and conspiracy theories over the decades since Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon. Some believe that the Apollo 11 landing was faked due to the American flag, seemingly flapping as if in a breeze in the videos and photos taken from the wind free lunar surface. Experts have since debunked these hypotheses, offering up explanations.
Regarding the flag, "the video you see where the flag's moving is because the astronaut just placed it there, and the inertia from when they let go kept it moving," said spaceflight historian Roger Launius, of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C told National Geographic News.
For those not sure about the validity of the Apollo 15 mission, a Japanese probe had photographic evidence proving them wrong. In 2008 the Japanese craft took pictures of the lunar terrain and compared them to the images taken in July 1971. They discovered that the photos were an exact match.
There is enough information out there favoring the reality of these extraordinary missions, but perhaps humankind needs to make another trip to the moon to really prove the naysayers wrong. China is next up for a moon landing, aiming to put a man on the moon by 2036.
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