First Landing is a science fiction novel by Robert Zubrin that tells the story of the first manned space expedition to Mars. Zubrin is the head of the Mars Society, an organization lobbying the real world NASA to send astronauts to Mars. The plan used to accomplish their mission in the book is the same one advocated by his group. In the novel, the explorers discover bacterial life on Mars and are abandoned due to political circumstances, and must fend for themselves if they want to return to Earth, thus highlighting many of the more robust features of Zubrin's plan for Mars.
Zubrin also wrote The Case For Mars, a detailed nonfiction explanation of the same plan.
At 2:56 UTC on July 21 (22:56 EDT July 20), six and a half hours after landing, Armstrong made his descent to the Moon surface and took his famous "one giant leap for mankind." Aldrin joined him, and the two spent two-and-a-half hours drilling core samples, photographing what they saw and collecting rocks.
The first images used a Slow-scan television system and were picked up at Goldstone in the USA but with better fidelity by Honeysuckle Creek in Australia.
In addition to fulfilling President John F. Kennedy's mandate to land a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s, Apollo 11 was an engineering test of the Apollo system; therefore, Armstrong snapped photos of the LM so engineers would be able to judge its post-landing condition.
Surveyor 3 was the first spacecraft in the Surveyor program to carry a scoop-and-claw device with which scientists, by remote control, could dig trenches, scoop up samples of lunar soil and perform bearing-strength tests by pressing the head of the scoop-unit against the lunar surface.
During its first lunar day of operation from April 19 to May 3, the spacecraft returned 6,315 high quality television pictures showing the operation of the surface sampler as well as near and distant views of the lunar surface in the vicinity of the spacecraft.
Surveyor 5, the first in the Surveyor series of soft-landers to carry a scientific instrument for analysis of the chemical composition of the moon's surface, successfully landed on the moon at 5:46 p.m.
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