Fra Mauro 1984 and now in a private collection, probably in France. The crater Fra Mauro and associated Fra Mauro formation of the Moon are named after him. The Apollo 13 lunar mission was intended to explore the Fra Mauro formation, but – due to the explosion aboard the spacecraft – Apollo 13's crew had to return to Earth without landing on the Moon. The formation was instead explored by astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell of the Apollo 14 mission in February 1971. Fra Mauro Fra Mauro, O.S.B. Cam., (died 1464) was an Italian cartographer who lived in the Republic of
Third-party evidence for Apollo Moon landings party observers could expect to see the various craft at specific times according to scheduled launch times and planned trajectories. The Soviet Union monitored the missions at their Space Transmissions Corps, which was "fully equipped with the latest intelligence-gathering and surveillance equipment." Vasily Mishin, in an interview for the article "The Moon Programme That Faltered," describes how the Soviet Moon programme dwindled after the Apollo landing. The missions were tracked by radar from several countries on the way to the Moon and back. A group at Kettering Grammar School, using simple radio equipment, monitored Soviet and U.S. spacecraft and calculated