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Apollo landing sites

Twelve astronauts walked on the Moon between July 1969 and December 1972, at six sites across the nearside. The early crews landed where the ground was flat and safe; the later ones went where the geology was, beside a lava channel and between mountains. That difference also decides how each site prints.

Apollo 1120 July 1969 · Mare Tranquillitatis · 0.674° N, 23.473° E
Apollo 1219 November 1969 · Oceanus Procellarum · 3.012° S, 23.422° W
Apollo 145 February 1971 · Fra Mauro · 3.645° S, 17.471° W
Apollo 1530 July 1971 · Hadley–Apennine · 26.132° N, 3.634° E
Apollo 1621 April 1972 · Descartes highlands · 8.973° S, 15.500° E
Apollo 1711 December 1972 · Taurus–Littrow · 20.191° N, 30.772° E

Landing dates (UTC), sites and crews from NASA's National Space Science Data Center, and terrain figures from the Lunar and Planetary Institute and the LROC team at Arizona State University. Coordinates are the centre points OrbitStudio uses for these destinations.

Where did the Apollo missions land?

All six landings were on the nearside, the half of the Moon that always faces Earth. Apollo 11 and 12 set down on the lava plains of Mare Tranquillitatis and Oceanus Procellarum, Apollo 14 in the ridged Fra Mauro region and Apollo 16 in the Descartes highlands, all within nine degrees of the equator. Apollo 15 and 17 went further north, to Hadley–Apennine at 26° and Taurus–Littrow at 20°.

Two astronauts went down each time while a third stayed in lunar orbit: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell, David Scott and James Irwin, John Young and Charles Duke, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt. Apollo 13 was aimed at Fra Mauro and never landed. Apollo 11 has its own page; this one compares the six.

Why were those sites chosen?

Safety came first. When NASA's site-selection board shortlisted places for the first landing, it asked for relatively few craters, a general slope under two degrees and approaches free of hills or cliffs that could confuse the landing radar, all close to the equator. Apollo 11 went to a flat, safe spot in Mare Tranquillitatis, and the same constraints still held for Apollo 12, on flat mare beside the robotic Surveyor 3 lander.

Apollo 12's pinpoint landing opened up harder ground. Apollo 14 took over Apollo 13's target at Fra Mauro, a blanket of debris thrown out by the impact that formed the Imbrium basin. Apollo 15, 16 and 17 were the J-missions, with longer stays, a lunar rover and more science, and they went for a lava channel under mountains, the highlands that cover most of the Moon, and a narrow valley between massifs.

Can you see the landers in a 3D print?

No. A descent stage is several metres across, and the elevation data behind these models is measured in metres per sample, not centimetres. The landers are far below what a printable terrain model can resolve, and so are the rover tracks and footpaths around them. What you print is the ground the crews worked on, at the coordinates where they worked.

Photographs are another matter. The camera on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the spacecraft whose measurements supply the heights, has imaged the sites from low orbit, and its pictures show the descent stages, experiment packages, rovers, tracks and flags. At Apollo 12 the lander, the experiments and the Surveyor 3 probe fit in one frame 275 metres wide: less than a millimetre of a default print.

Which Apollo site makes the best 3D print?

Apollo 15, if you want relief at true scale. On a model 200 mm across of a region 90 km wide, a kilometre of height becomes about 2.2 mm at 1×. The Apennine mountains east of Hadley stand 3 km and more above the plain, which makes the front some 7 mm tall or more.

Hadley Rille is the exception on that site. About a kilometre wide and a few hundred metres deep, it comes out 2 to 3 mm wide and under a millimetre deep at 1×, so 2× is worth trying for it. Apollo 17 comes next: the massifs either side of Taurus–Littrow stand 1.5 to 2 km high, which is 3 to 4.5 mm at 1× and twice that at 2×.

Apollo 16 sits between the two groups. Stone Mountain, whose lower slopes Young and Duke drove up, is 540 m high: just over a millimetre at 1×, so 2× to 3× suits it. Apollo 11, 12 and 14 are the flat ones. The mare plains need 3× to 5×, as the Apollo 11 page explains, and the Fra Mauro ridge beside Apollo 14 is about 90 m high, or 0.2 mm at 1×. They make good pieces with the coordinates and the date engraved around the frame.

Print Apollo 15 in OrbitStudio Watch how it works · 1:12

What is OrbitStudio?

OrbitStudio turns real NASA elevation data into 3D-printable models. You pick a region of the Moon on a globe or a flat map, choose a jigsaw puzzle or a solid ornament, and get ready-to-print files with terrain and borders already separated and coloured. No CAD, no mesh repair. The heights come from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been measuring the Moon's surface since 2009.

Trying it is free and needs no account: pick a region, generate it and turn it around in 3D. Downloading the model — STL files and pre-coloured 3MF files for Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer — uses one credit from a pass. The generator covers Mars too.

Other landmarks

Apollo 11 landing site Tycho Crater Copernicus Crater Tsiolkovskiy Crater All lunar landmarks

The night sky, too

StellarMesh, from the same maker, turns the sky over any place, on any date from 1900 to 2100, into a 3D-printable star map. Its STL is free.