During the Apollo moon landings how was the lunar lander able to slow down enough to land on the moon? And then speed up enough to connect back up to the orbiter? Let alone getting into the same orbit. All movies show this in slow motion and makes it look easy.
In: Planetary Science
The entire lunar module were a two stage rocket complete with two main rocket engines and were filled with large fuel tanks, in addition to the astronauts and experiments. The first stage was called the descent module and was used to slow down the lunar module from orbit and eventually land on the lunar surface. This is the part that had the landing legs and a lot of the disposable experiment packages including the rover. The second stage was the ascent module and would be used to take off from the moon, leaving the descent module, and accelerate up to orbital speeds. This is the part that have the astronauts and living quarters.
The photos can be a bit confusing though. Due to the low gravity they do not need very powerful engines to land and take off. The orbital speeds are much lower then around Earth so they need a lot less fuel so the fuel tanks are much smaller. There is no atmosphere and the exhaust is invisible. Therefore what you see is just the ascent module lifting off the surface apparently by magic. But if you look at the ascent module it have a big circle on one side, this would be the fuel tank.
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