Neil Armstrong’s face seen for the first time during Moon walk
THE only clear picture showing the face of Neil Armstrong while walking on the Moon has been produced by an amateur photographer from Cheshire.
Andy Saunders, 45, a property developer from Culcheth, discovered that Armstrong paused long enough after first stepping on to the lunar surface for a grainy impression of his face to be seen in several frames of high-definition video footage released by Nasa.
There are surprisingly few images of Armstrong on the lunar surface, because he took most of the photographs, and was only caught from behind in one shot by accident when Buzz Aldrin was capturing a panorama.
Applying photo-enhancing technology used by astronomers, Mr Saunders overlaid the stills on top of each other to reveal the recognisable features of the world’s first moonwalker.
He released the image for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, the first time Armstrong’s face has been seen clearly on the Moon.
“I felt almost like an archaeologist brushing off the dust from some longforgotten artefact,” he said.
“It was fortunate that he leaned forward to see what he was doing, and I noticed he had his visor up, which meant, crucially, his face was visible for a few seconds. I managed to get three separate good shots. I couldn’t believe it when the image emerged. You never see Armstrong’s face on the Moon, and there he was.”
A camera on the landing module did pick up Armstrong, but his features cannot be seen because his visor was down or he had his back to the spacecraft. The new image was taken just minutes after he had stepped out of the landing module, before Aldrin had even walked on the surface.
Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society, said: “It’s an important record of a really crucial moment.”
Dr Dan Brown, an astronomer at Nottingham Trent University said the image was “magical and touching”.
The experience of floating in space with nothing to do while colleagues fixed a broken video camera during a spacewalk in 1969 changed astronaut Rusty Schweickart’s life.
Left to contemplate the spinning Earth below, Schweickart experienced a personal epiphany, concluding that humans were always destined to leave the planet since life itself began
3.7 billion years ago.
He believes that the Apollo programme represents a “cosmic birth” for humanity, symbolising the moment when Mother Earth spawned a new generation of space travellers, who from their new vantage point could look back and appreciate the planet as a single living organism in need of protection.
His somewhat “off the planet” perspective is in sharp contrast to more pragmatic astronauts who see the Moon mission as a race for technological supremacy over the Soviet Union, and the triumph of capitalism over socialism.
“I have a different view than most of the other astronauts,” he told The Daily Telegraph ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing today.
“My interest is in the kind of philosophical, long-term overview of what’s been done, rather than reminiscing about the good old days when we flew.
“I’m not particularly interested in Neil Armstrong’s flight. For me the importance of Apollo was in humanity first looking back and realising that the Earth was the home of all life.
“In a very real sense, the Earth has given birth to life beyond the Earth. I have looked at this and referred to this as cosmic birth [which] will not be celebrated for 50 years or 100 years. But 10,000 years from now there will still be that moment when life on Earth first moved out into the cosmos from Mother Earth.”
Schweickart, 83, flew on the Apollo 9 mission with David Scott and James Mcdivitt in a 10-day adventure that began on March 3 1969.
The mission was the first time the lunar landing module had been fully tested ahead of the lunar landing and Nasa was keen to test the engines, navigation systems, docking manoeuvres and life-support systems.
But Schweickart’s spacewalk to collect data from the outside of the
craft was almost cancelled after he became nauseous. Vomiting on a spacewalk is lethal, as it’s impossible to clear the throat.
When he eventually did make it outside the spacecraft, the video camera jammed, giving him an opportunity to float in the silence, 119 miles above Earth.
“This was an ideal moment,” he said. “Impulsively, I said to myself, ‘I am going to shed my astronaut persona, I’m going to be a human being.’
“Nobody was talking, the radio was completely off. Dave was busy, Jim wasn’t talking. I was just hanging, floating in my spacesuit like a pea in the pod. And I was suddenly looking at this incredibly beautiful planet, which contains everything you know and love, and you could cover it all up with your thumbnail. Unasked, uninivited,
‘My interest is in the kind of philosophical overview rather than reminiscing about the good old days’
a whole bunch of questions started to come up, like ‘how did I get here?’ and when I say ‘me’ who is that ‘me?’ and ‘what is the meaning of life?’”
Schweickart believes this new view of Earth seeded the environmental and social awakening of the Sixties, as well as the Gaia theory proposed by British scientist James Lovelock, which holds that the planet is one single organism.
“Life is an amazing thing and looking back and seeing that Earth rise over that desolate horizon of the Moon was for me the first time when humanity got an understanding of what it’s all about and what this evolutionary process is,” Schweickart added.
“This is a moment in time when we are moving out and life is evolving beyond the limits of the Earth, and Apollo was that turning point.”