During the 1970 fiscal year, ACIC created approximately 200 products in support of Apollo. During the 1969 fiscal year, ACIC created more than 300 different cartographic products in support of five Apollo flights. With the Apollo moon orbits, cartographers also could get photographs and map the dark side of the moon, the side that always faces away from Earth, for the first time.ĪCIC and AMS produced hundreds of maps for NASA throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. The higher-resolution images allowed for even more intricate maps, Helmering said. Apollo mission cameras, from about 100 miles up, were able to photograph the lunar surface at a much higher resolution than cameras from Earth, which were 238,900 miles away. It was computer-assisted, but everything was captured by a cartographer.”Įven more detailed photographs of the moon became available in the late 1960s and early 1970s with NASA’s Apollo missions. “The computer would record points and determine distances and shapes. “There was a cursor that we could move using levers across the photos,” Helmering said. Once that was done, cartographers used photo-viewing equipment and computers to make measurements of the details of the photographs, ultimately creating a map. It’s a mathematical process done with the help of computers.” “The process to relate all the photographs is not trivial. “You have to make sure whatever territory appears in one photograph appears again in an adjacent photograph,” he said. Cartographers, putting together a lunar jigsaw puzzle, used computers to piece together the disparate “snapshots” of moon territory, he said. There are two main steps to creating a lunar map from photographs, Helmering said. Many different photographs of the same feature, such as a crater, can be compared to determine its true qualities including height, diameter and depth. “Accurate coordinates of the sites needed to be determined in a coordinate system consistent with accurate vehicle orbit information,” Unruh said.Ī cartographer can follow specifications to create maps that show only the features that users would find useful, Helmering said.Ī cartographer can identify and compensate for distortion in a photo. The ability to compute positions was vital for NASA to land a spacecraft on the moon said John Unruh, Ph.D., former cartographer and scientist with ACIC. “You can determine geographic coordinates from a map and if you use those, you can compute a position.”

“A map generally has a high level of accuracy associated with it,” Helmering said. In 1609, English mapmaker Thomas Harriot drew the first known maps of the moon with his telescope.Īs centuries passed improved technology and photography enabled more detailed images of the moon to be captured.īut even the most detailed photographs cannot convey the moon’s surface features as accurately or usefully as a cartographer can with a map. Maps of the moon had existed for centuries before ACIC and AMS started working on their own lunar maps. Fortunately for NASA, ACIC and AMS had already anticipated the need for lunar maps to support moon exploration and were already working on the task. Army Map Service in Washington, D.C., two NGA predecessor agencies, to collect data to map the surface of the moon.

In 1959, NASA funded a joint effort by ACIC in St. NASA also wasn’t supposed to duplicate capabilities other federal agencies already held, he said. Air Force Aeronautical Chart and Information Center.

The success of Sputnik sparked the United States to re-evaluate its own space exploration efforts which resulted in the creation of NASA in 1958.īut as a new agency, NASA didn’t have the personnel or expertise to map the surface of its desired destination, the moon, said Raymond Helmering, Ph.D., former lunar mapping technical project manager for the U.S. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth.

Lunar landing photographs