I’m Ernie Wright. I work in the
Scientific Visualization Studio. My producer, David Ladd, and I made this video
for the 50th anniversary of Apollo 13.
So, Apollo 13 is pretty famously the moon mission where the
oxygen tank explodes and the astronauts have to use the lunar module
as a lifeboat. I’m a big fan of the Tom Hanks movie, but
I wanted to do something that people hadn’t seen before.
Something that Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data uniquely allows us to do.
To show what the crew saw as they flew around
the far side of the moon. They arrive at the moon
about a day after the explosion. They’ve been put on a free return
trajectory that will sort of slingshot them around the moon and send them
home. I found just enough data in the old
Apollo documents to reconstruct their flight path. I put the virtual
camera on that path, and I pointed it at the things they took pictures
of using the same lenses they had on board.
So, you see like they saw: Tsiolkovskiy Crater
and Mare Moscoviense and the Lunar Highlands. By the
way, a lot of the major features on the far side were named by the
Soviet Union because they were the first to photograph it in 1959.
I made almost
15 minutes of this stuff. David cut it together in a way
that found the emotional beats of this part of the journey.
The astronauts were behind the moon for almost half an hour, completely out
of contact with the Earth. And you can just imagine what it felt
like to see the Earth again, reestablish radio contact,
and know that they were finally heading home.
It took them almost three more days before they finally splashed down.
The timing of the explosion was actually fortunate in a way.
If it had happened during or after the moon landing, there wouldn’t have been
a lunar module to serve as a lifeboat. And if it was earlier, they might
not have had enough power, air and water to make it all the way back.
Thanks for watching.