The spacecraft was angled15° toward the Sun, which revealed the shadowed side of the flag.īecause they've been exposed to 40 years of harsh, unfiltered sunlight and space radiation, Apollo's flags should now be pure white, their colorful stars and stripes having bleached out completely. "Bird's-eye" view of the Apollo 16 landing site, as recorded by a high-resolution camera on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. "I get flag-picture questions all the time," Robinson tells me, and the cameras record one or two Apollo sites every month as part of what he calls "cartography sanity checks". With a resolution of just 1.6 feet (0.5 meter) per pixel, LROC's twin narrow-angle cameras were up to the task of recording the landing sites in remarkable detail. What Happened to the Flags on The Moon?Īldrin reported seeing Apollo 11's moon flag blown down by rocket exhaust as he and Armstrong blasted off the lunar surface, but it's taken sharp-eyed detective work by Mark Robinson and his Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team to learn the fate of that one and all the others. As recounted in NASA Contractor Report 188251, the historic flag was purchased, literally, off the shelf for $5.50 at a local Sears store. In fact, they didn't really have a plan for the flag-raising until about three months before Apollo 11's launch. NASA officials never intended for the 5-by-3-foot nylon flags to last indefinitely. Over the years, many have wondered what became of those historic banners. The deploying of the Lunar Flag Assembly, as it was known officially, would be repeated by each subsequent pair of moonwalkers. Behind him are the lunar module Orion and a Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV).Īmong the many Kodak moments from that mission, Armstrong and Aldrin promptly erected an American flag near the descent module Eagle.
Apollo 16 astronaut John Young jumps for joy as he salutes an American flag that he and crewmate Charlie Duke erected soon after landing.
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