The only work to date to collect data gathered during the American and Soviet missions in an accessible and complete reference of current scientific and technical information about the Moon.

Removes the scanning artefacts and transmission imperfections to produce a most comprehensive and beautifully detailed set of images of the lunar surface. To help practical astronomers, all the photographs are systematically related to an Earth-based view. Organized to make it easy for astronomers to use, enabling ground-based images and views to be compared with the Orbiter photographs.

The untold story of the historic voyage to the moon that closed out one of our darkest years with a nearly unimaginable triumph In August 1968, NASA made a bold decision: in just sixteen weeks, the United States would launch humankind’s first flight to the moon. Only the year before, three astronauts had burned to death in their spacecraft, and since then the Apollo program had suffered one setback after another. Meanwhile, the Russians were winning the space race, the Cold War was getting hotter by the month, and President Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade seemed sure to be broken. But when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were summoned to a secret meeting and told of the dangerous mission, they instantly signed on. Written with all the color and verve of the best narrative non-fiction, Apollo 8 takes us from Mission Control to the astronaut’s homes, from the test labs to the launch pad. The race to prepare an untested rocket for an unprecedented journey paves the way for the hair-raising trip to the moon. Then, on Christmas Eve, a nation that has suffered a horrendous year of assassinations and war is heartened by an inspiring message from the trio of astronauts in lunar orbit. And when the mission is over—after the first view of the far side of the moon, the first earth-rise, and the first re-entry through the earth’s atmosphere following a flight to deep space—the impossible dream of walking on the moon suddenly seems within reach. The full story of Apollo 8 has never been told, and only Jeffrey Kluger—Jim Lovell’s co-author on their bestselling book about Apollo 13—can do it justice. Here is the tale of a mission that was both a calculated risk and a wild crapshoot, a stirring account of how three American heroes forever changed our view of the home planet.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The riveting inside story of three heroic astronauts who took on the challenge of mankind’s historic first mission to the Moon, from the bestselling author of Shadow Divers. “Robert Kurson tells the tale of Apollo 8 with novelistic detail and immediacy.”—Andy Weir, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Martian and Artemis By August 1968, the American space program was in danger of failing in its two most important objectives: to land a man on the Moon by President Kennedy’s end-of-decade deadline, and to triumph over the Soviets in space. With its back against the wall, NASA made an almost unimaginable leap: It would scrap its usual methodical approach and risk everything on a sudden launch, sending the first men in history to the Moon—in just four months. And it would all happen at Christmas. In a year of historic violence and discord—the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago—the Apollo 8 mission would be the boldest, riskiest test of America’s greatness under pressure. In this gripping insider account, Robert Kurson puts the focus on the three astronauts and their families: the commander, Frank Borman, a conflicted man on his final mission; idealistic Jim Lovell, who’d dreamed since boyhood of riding a rocket to the Moon; and Bill Anders, a young nuclear engineer and hotshot fighter pilot making his first space flight. Drawn from hundreds of hours of one-on-one interviews with the astronauts, their loved ones, NASA personnel, and myriad experts, and filled with vivid and unforgettable detail, Rocket Men is the definitive account of one of America’s finest hours. In this real-life thriller, Kurson reveals the epic dangers involved, and the singular bravery it took, for mankind to leave Earth for the first time—and arrive at a new world. “Rocket Men is a riveting introduction to the [Apollo 8] flight. . . . Kurson details the mission in crisp, suspenseful scenes. . . . [A] gripping book.”—The New York Times Book Review

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) was successfully launched on June 18, 2009 and joined an international eet of satellites (Japan’s SELENE/Kaguya, China’s Chang’E, and India’s Chandrayaan-1) that have recently orbited the Moon for scienti c exploration p- poses. LRO is the rst step to ful ll the US national space goal to return humans to the Moon’s surface, which is a primary objective of NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission - rectorate (ESMD). TheinitialLROmissionphasehasaone-yeardurationfullyfundedunder ESMD support. LRO is expected to have an extended phase of operations for at least two additional years to undertake further lunar science measurements that are directly linked to objectives outlined in the National Academy of Science’s report on the Scienti c Context for Exploration of the Moon (SCEM). All data from LRO will be deposited in the Planetary Data System (PDS) archive so as to be usable for both exploration and science by the widest possible community. A NASA Announcement of Opportunity (AO) solicited proposals for LRO instruments with associated exploration measurement investigations. A rigorous evaluation process - volving scienti c peer review, in combination with technical, cost and management risk assessments, recommended six instruments for LRO development and deployment. The competitively selected instruments are: Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Rad- tion (CRaTER), Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment (DLRE), Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP), Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector (LEND), Lunar Orbiter Laser - timeter (LOLA), and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC).

When human exploration of the lunar surface began in 1969, it marked not only an unprecedented technological achievement but also the culmination of scientific efforts to understand lunar geology. Memoirs of the Apollo astronauts have preserved the exploratory aspects of these missions; now a geologist who was an active participant in the lunar program offers a detailed historical view of those events--including the pre-Apollo era--from a heretofore untold scientific perspective. It was the responsibility of the scientific team of which Don Wilhelms was a member to assemble an overall picture of the Moon's structure and history in order to recommend where on the lunar surface fieldwork should be conducted and samples collected. His book relates the site-selection process in detail, and draws in concomitant events concerning mission operations to show how they affected the course of the scientific program. While discussing all six landings in detail, it tells the behind-the-scenes story of telescopic and spacecraft investigations before, during, and after the manned landings. Intended for anyone interested the space program, the history of science, or the application of geology to planetology, To a Rocky Moon will leave all readers with a better idea of what the Moon is really like. In so expertly summarizing this earlier phase of exploration, it stands as an authoritative touchstone for those involved in the next.

The Moon held little interest for most scientists after its basic astronomic properties had been determined and before direct exploration appeared likely. Speculations about its internal structure, composition, and origin were only broadly constrained by cosmochemical data from meteorites and solar spectra, and by astronomic data about its size, shape, motions, and surficial properties. Most investigators who were active before the space age began in 1957 believed that significant new advances in lunar knowledge required acquisition of additional data. One analytical technique, however, was insufficiently exploited before the 1960's. Few scientists since the geologist Gilbert had studied the lunar surface systematically from the historical point of view. Those who did immediately obtained important new insights about the Moon's postaccretion evolution. Then, the pioneering work of E.M. Shoemaker and R.J. Hackman focused the powerful methods of stratigraphy on lunar problems. Stratigraphy is the study of the spatial distribution, chronologic relations, and formative processes of layered rocks. Its application to the Moon came relatively late and met resistance, but the fundamental stratigraphic approach was, in fact, readily transferable to the partly familiar, partly exotic deposits visible on the lunar surface. Stratigraphic methods were applied systematically during the 1960's in a program of geologic mapping that aimed at reconstructing the evolution of the Moon's nearside. Order was discovered among the seemingly diverse and random landforms of the lunar surface by determining the sequence in which they were emplaced. The stratigraphic sequence and the emplacement processes deduced therefrom provided a framework for exploration by the Apollo program and for the task of analyzing the returned samples. During the 19703, the sophisticated labor of hundreds of analysts was brought to bear on the wealth of material returned by the American Apollo and the Soviet Luna spacecraft. Our present perception of the Moon has emerged from the interplay between sampling studies and stratigraphically based photogeology. These two approaches are complementary: Photogeology contributes a historical context by viewing the whole Moon from a distant vantage point, whereas the samples contain information on rock types and absolute ages unobtainable by remote methods. Neither approach by itself, even the most elaborate program of direct surface exploration, could have yielded the current advanced state of knowledge within the relatively short time of two decades. This volume presents a model for the geologic evolution of the Moon that has emerged mainly from this integration of photogeologic stratigraphy and sample analysis. Other aspects of the vast field of lunar science are discussed here only insofar as they pertain to the evolution of visible surface features. Chemical data obtained by remote sensing supplement the photogeologic interpretations of some geologic units, and geophysical data obtained both from lunar orbit and on the surface constrain hypotheses of the origin of many internally generated structures and deposits. Studies of the same data that treat the Moon as a whole, including speculations about the intriguing but unsolved problem of its origin, have been adequately covered in other reviews. This volume is written primarily for geoscientists and other planetologists who have examined some aspect of lunar or planetary science and who want a review of lunar science from the viewpoint of historical geology. It should also provide a useful summary for the advanced student who is conversant with common geologic terms. It may, furthermore, interest the geologist who has not studied the Moon but who wishes to see how his methodology has been applied to another planet.