The First Lunar Landing

PART IV

ARMSTRONG
This is a closeup picture. (Photo 27.) It's actually a stereo picture of fine particulate material on the Moon. This is taken from about an inch or two away from the surface, and shows a shiny coating on some of the clumps there. This appears to be melted glass and an analysis of the cause for that characteristic is of extreme interest to the scientific community. The second picture taken with that scientific camera shows the nature of the clods of lunar surface material (Photo 28), and this picture shows the 80-foot crater, which you observed earlier during the final phases of descent (Photo 29). We had very much hoped that this crater would be deep enough to show the lunar bedrock. It was about 15 or 20 feet deep, and although there are rocks in the bottom, there is no evidence on the inner walls of the lunar bedrock.

ALDRIN
We deposited several items on the lunar surface. I'm sure you're aware of these. One was a disc with 73 messages from nations of the world. There was a patch from Apollo 1, and various medals from the cosmonauts. We also elected, as a crew, to deposit a symbol which was representative of our patch; that is, the U.S. eagle carrying the olive branch to the lunar surface. We thought it was appropriate to deposit this replica of the olive branch before we left.

ARMSTRONG
After reentering the LM, we could see the effects of our activity on the surface. (Photo 30.) You'll note that the surface looks considerably darker in the area where the majority of the walking took place. However, on the left side of the picture, where it is not as dark, there was also a good bit of walking. That indicates that the walking probably just increases your ability to notice the effects of the strange lighting that Buzz talked about earlier, where the cross-Sun lighting is a good bit darker than the down-Sun lighting.

ALDRIN
Following the EVA, we had a sleep period, which in a word, didn't go quite as well as we thought it might. We found it was quite difficult to keep warm. When we pulled the window shades over the windows, we found that the environment within the cabin chilled considerably and after about two or three hours, we found that it was rather difficult for us to sleep. You see mounted in the right hand window, the 16-millimeter camera (Photo 31), that was mounted for taking the pictures on the surface. Following the sleep period, as we're approaching the lift-off point we progressed with a gradual power-up of the lunar module, which included another star alignment check and as Mike came over in Columbia, one revolution before lift-off, we used the radar to track him as he went over. We continued the check out. You see here, one of the data books that's mounted up in front of the instrument panel (Photo 32), that was used to record the various messages that were sent up to us, a whole host of numbers, for the particular maneuvers that were coming up, that we would copy down. We would log these on that sort of a data sheet.