Today marks the 40th anniversary of “…one giant leap for mankind.” On July 20, 1969 a human first stepped onto the moon. Oddly, there is a significant minority of people who don’t believe this. The Moon Landing Deniers (on whom I reported here 3 years ago) now have to increase the complexity of that conspiracy theory because of some recent news.

Here are some new pictures taken from lunar orbit in the last few weeks of some of the Apollo landing sites. The point of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter wasn’t to prove the doubters wrong, but rather to gather an accurate survey of the moon to aid the Chinese (and maybe ourselves) in future exploration. You may recall that Apollo 11 almost crash landed on a rock pile, and Armstrong had to manually hover the lander over to a smooth area, landing with scant seconds of fuel to spare. They don’t want to repeat that experience. Also, the orbiter should map out interesting mineral and erosion features that merit closer investigation.

As one who watched the first landing live, I like to think that we’ll be back.