A Day at the Apollo 12 Landing Site

The most common questions to the LROC team before launch concerned what will we see at the Apollo sites? Will we see the Lunar Module descent stage and rovers? What about rover tracks, the American flags? As we now know the LROC NAC images clearly show all of the above items. From the LROC images it is now certain that the American flags are still standing and casting shadows at all the sites, except for Tranquility Base, the Apollo 11 landing site. The best way to see that the US flags are still there is to view a time series of LROC images taken at different times of day and watch the shadow circle the flag. This time lapse movie shows just such a sequence of images highlighting the movement of the flag’s shadow at the Apollo 12 landing site. More information about LROC imagery of the Apollo landing sites can be found on the LROC webpage: