20th July: First Moon landing

45 years ago today, the Apollo 11 Lunar Module landed on the surface of the Moon. Here are 10 things you may not know about the Apollo 11 mission.

Buzz Aldrin and the American flag on the Moon
(NASA photo)

1. 
   Since the crew of Apollo 10 had named their spacecraft Charlie Brown and Snoopy, the crew of Apollo 11 were under strict instructions from NASA to choose more serious names for theirs. Snowcone and Haystack were the names used in the planning stages, but for the actual mission, the Command Module was named Columbia after the Columbiad, the giant cannon shell "spacecraft" fired by a giant cannon in Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon; and the Lunar Module was named Eagle for the national bird of the United States, the Bald eagle.
2. On board the spacecraft was a piece of wood from the plane in which the Wright brothers made the first flight, and a piece of fabric from the wing, which Neil Armstrong chose to take as part of his personal kit.
3. Buzz Aldrin's personal kit included a Holy Communion kit prepared by the pastor of the Webster Presbyterian Church, where Aldrin was an elder. Buzz Aldrin is the only person to have taken Holy Communion on the moon. He did so privately because atheists had strongly objected to crews of previous missions quoting from the Bible in space and had even brought lawsuits against NASA. It was reported that Neil Armstrong watched respectfully but did not partake. Aldrin brought the communion chalice back with him and gave it to the church, which commemorates the event annually on the Sunday nearest to July 20th.
4. The first words spoken by Neil Armstrong as he stepped onto the surface of the moon are well known. However, the Eagle had been sitting on the moon surface for several hours before this with the astronauts inside. Nobody is really sure what the first words uttered after the landing actually were. It could have been Aldrin pointing out that the contact light had turned on by saying, “Contact light.” Armstrong then instructed Aldrin to turn off the descent engine by saying, “Shut down.” Aldrin followed by turning off the engine and saying, “Okay. Engine stop.” For the sake of a good story, though, people tend to go with “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
5. The moon smells. The astronauts who have been there reported that it smelled of spent gunpowder or wet ashes in a fireplace. Scientists have not yet worked out why this is.
6. Three new minerals were discovered in the rock samples collected by the astronauts: armalcolite, tranquillityite, and pyroxferroite. Armalcolite was named after Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins.
7. The computers on board the Apollo 11 spacecraft were not very powerful. There is more processing power in the average family car, and even in a mobile phone than there was in the rocket that went to the moon.
8. The US flag that was so carefully placed by the astronauts was knocked over by the exhaust when the Eagle took off. Subsequent missions learned from this and planted their flags at least 30 meters (100 feet) away from the lunar modules.
9. As well as the flag, the mission also left behind some scientific instruments to measure moonquakes, an Apollo 1 mission patch (Apollo 1 had ended in disaster with all its astronauts killed) and a plaque containing pictures of earth, the signatures of the astronauts and of Richard Nixon, who was President at the time. The plaque is inscribed with the words "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind."
10. The last words to be transmitted from Columbia at the end of the mission were "Everything's okay. Our checklist is complete. Awaiting swimmers," spoken by Neil Armstrong.