In 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced an ambitious goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade. First, NASA learned to live and work in space with the Mercury and Gemini missions. Ultimately, NASA answered the challenge in 1969 with the successful landing of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module (LM). To record their historic voyages and collect scientific observations many thousands of photographs were acquired with handheld and automated cameras during all the Apollo missions. After returning to Earth, the film was developed and stored at Johnson Space Center (JSC), where they still reside. Due to the historical significance of the original flight films, typically only duplicate (2nd or 3rd generation) film products are currently available for study and used to make prints.
To allow full access to the original flight films for both
researchers and the general public, Johnson Space Center and Arizona
State University's Space Exploration
Resources are scanning and creating an online digital archive of
all the original Apollo flight films. Through this online interface,
users may browse through the archive and download any of the images.
This web site also provides a suite of resources regarding the images
and the cameras that were used during the Apollo program. Finally, be sure
to check out other images of the Moon from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera
and images from the Mercury and Gemini missions
Current Project Status
Metric processing is ongoing, with the current release to include darks and images taken prior to launch (see About the Scans and the Mapping and Panoramic Camera Photograph Indices found on the Support Data page).
Apollo 15 and 16 Panoramic processing has been completed. Apollo 17 Panoramic processing has begun! They can be viewed using the Browse Gallery interface.
The Apollo Metric Image collection now includes 9784 Apollo 15, 16 and 17 processed Metric images, they can be viewed using the Image Map
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