Saturday, October 10, 2009

The year of the moon: 1969 and 2009!

On 9 Oct 2009 NASA successfully bombed two spacecrafts, Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) into moon’s South Pole in search of hidden ice, another milestone in moon expedition. Weeks before, Chandrayan 1, India’s first moon exploration had helped in finding flakes of water particles on moon’s surface.


Year 1969, an article in Reader’s Digest 1969 May issue carried an article titled “The year of the moon”.

The article is an interesting read. It carried in depth details on various preparations carried out for the moon mission. The preparation had started way back in 1961 in 20,000 industrial plants and 200 US universities. 4, 00,000 people involved in the project and had spent almost 24,000million USD.
The article also carried detailed scripts on sequence of events right from blast offs from Houston to landing in moon to collecting the moon’s particles and photographing
The instruction given to astronauts included to stand still for a moment as soon he steps his foot in the moon the after a while twist and turn.
Without moving take the bag and collect loose rocks and soils and later take photographs

The 1969 may issue also had a advertorial of a journal “The plain truth”. The journal contained an article named ‘who will rule the space’ that had shocking answers to the Apollo 8 moon expedition.



Now 40 years after the first moon mission, 2009 is also turning out to be “The year of the moon” especially for India after the successful Chandrayan 1 mission. Now let’s wait for the year 2014 for India’s first manned mission to Moon.

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