To the Moon

For thousands of years, the moon was an object of fascination across time, space and cultures. In 1610, Galileo Galilei first turned it into an object of scientific study, pointing his telescope to the moon and revealing a rugged world of mountains, valleys, craters and ridges.

Some 350 years later, in a 1961 speech to Congress, President John F. Kennedy committed America to landing on the moon within a decade. Thus began an intense mobilization across government agencies to make it happen. Landing a man on the moon successfully was a challenge not just of technology but also of geography: Given the moon’s uneven topography, choosing a good landing site was of utmost importance.

They would need a map.

The Aeronautical Chart and Information Center, then the nation’s premier mapping agency for defense, mobilized for the task.

The center employed experts in photogrammetry — the process for making accurate measurements from photos — who could transform aerial images to correct distortion, account for overlap among images and produce consistent maps without ground control points. Those skills were vital to creating an accurate lunar mosaic using images taken from telescopes.

The agency’s USAF Lunar Wall Mosaic: Lunar Equatorial Mosaic was produced in 1962, just one year after Kennedy’s speech. Cartographers created the map, a copy of which is held by the Library’s Geography and Map Division, by applying manual photogrammetric methods to telescopic photographs.

The large-format map created a foundational understanding across agencies and staffs of the moon’s topographic surface, and it was utilized for early decision-making within the Apollo program. Visible on the center-right section of the map is Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility), the area where the Apollo 11 crew landed safely in 1969.