Still Standing

Debris from Apollo 12 litters the Moon's Ocean of Storms in this recent image from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has dipped to within 13 miles of the lunar surface. Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landed on the Moon in November 1969, just a few hundred feet from the unmanned Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which itself arrived at the Moon in 1967. The image shows the descent stage of their lunar lander, Surveyor 3, the instruments they set up, and the trails they blazed around the landscape. LRO is snapping the sharpest images of the lunar surface ever obtained from orbit, providing the best map of the surface to date. It has photographed all six of the Apollo landing sites, as well as two unmanned Soviet lunar rovers from the same era. [NASA/GSFC/ASU]