For some reason I was under the impression that we had landed on the dark side of the moon - because the light side was much too hot, even with space suits. A friend tells me the exact opposite (light side, because dark side was much too cold.) Which is it?
It was the light (visible) side, in the Sea of Tranquility. Here is a photo of the moon showing all of the landing sites.
Among other considerations, if they had chosen a site on the non-visible side of the moon, there would have been no communications possible between the crew and NASA on Earth.
Has the dark side been mapped?
I think the OP was asking whether the landings were on the portion of the moon sunlit at the time, versus the dark portion, not backside versus side towards Earth.
Local morning. There are long shadows in the moon shots because the Sun was low over the lunar horizon at the time of the landings.
Paging the Bad Astronomer! Paging the Bad Astronomer!
We (well, actually, a dozen or so Americans) landed on the near side. I suspect this was so telescopes could watch the landing site, but that’s just a guess.
There is no “dark side” or “light side” of Earth’s moon; it is always rotating relative to the sun. The moon experiences day and night, sunrise and sunset, and all parts of it see sunlight at times. The temperature of the surface rises during the day and falls during the night.
However, the moon is not rotating relative to the Earth. There are parts of the surface (the near side) from which the Earth is always visible, stationary in the sky, and other parts (the far side) from which the Earth is never visible.
The moon would have a light side and a dark side only if the Earth gave off light and the sun didn’t.
[sup]*I’ll ignore libration for now.[/sup]
Yup. What do you think the guy did in the command module when the other guys were having all the fun on the Moon? Jack Schmitt wanted Apollo 17 to land on the dark side. Even had the communication’s problems worked out. Sadly, NASA didn’t have the money. 
The Soviets’ Luna 3 probe was the first to return images of the far side of the moon, back in 1959.
Here are the collected images
Here’s a picture of the first map.
Here’s a modern map of the entire lunar surface.
On the far side. Jack Schmitt wanted Apollo 17 to land on the far side.
Grumble grumble grumble.
[Pink Floyd]There is no dark side of the Moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark[/PF]
What side did we land on?
Well, the outside, of course! <rimshot>
Corr
who opened this thread hoping no one had said that yet
Curse you Corrvin, I’m too late:p
IIRC, Schmitt was a geologist, the first scientist (as opposed to pilot) astronaut, right? So why did he want to land on the far side? Was there some reason to think that the geology (selenology?) of the far side of the Moon was more interesting than the near side?
Arguably, the far side of the moon is the dark side, because it doesn’t get any reflected light from the earth. It also doesn’t get eclipsed by the earth, though, which is why it’s arguable.
According to Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon the reason Schmitt wanted to go to the far side (with a landing site on the floor of the Tsiolkovsky crater) was
And Schmitt was a geologist first, before he ever became an astronaut. They had to train him to be a pilot before they could do much of his astronaut training.
In addition to the reasons that Tuckerfan points out, their are other differences on the far side of the moon. The moon’s centre of gravity is slightly closer (by a few kilometres) to the Earth than its geometric centre, and the crust is thicker on the far side. It might be that there are detectable geological differences for those reasons.
You know, I blame Pink Floyd for all this ignorance about what the sides of the moon should be called. First they throw in all that nonsense about the “dark side” of the moon. And then they insist that we don’t need to education.
I mean, sheesh!, how are we supposed to get people to understand the universe if they listen to such garbage!
On the other hand, Pink Floyd has gotten many a teenager and college student to go to planetaria to see laser shows (with a star show on the side).
And if nothing else, the very fact that none of the other missions landed on the far side makes it interesting. Even if there were no a priori reason to expect differences, it’s nice to be sure.
Yeah, I’m here. As has been pointed out, the Apollo missions all landed on the near side, so that communications were direct. If they landed on the far side, they would have been in radio blackout.
Also, the missions were done usually in early local morning, when the Sun hadn’t risen very high yet. That minimized the ground temperature, so the dust wasn’t all that hot. The suits were designed to reject heating from the Sun; for example, they were white to reflect light. The heating problems were due to the astronauts’ bodies. The human body puts out a lot of heat, which had to be dumped. They used a clever system of water circulation to do that.
As for near/bright v. far/dark, see here.
James Michener’s Space novel is partially about a fictional Apollo 18 trip to the far side of the moon. He goes over the various issues that would need to be resolved, if you’re interested.
I haven’t read James Michner’s Space, but considering that Michner wrote it, it probably spent most of its time with people backstabbing each other and sleeping their way to the top. :rolleyes:
(Hmmm … then again, Ben Bova’s novels are all like that, too…)