Apollo 14 stage of lunar module "Antares" impacted the Moon on February 7, 1971 at 00:45:25.7 UT (February 6, 7:45 PM EST) . "Antares"' descent stage and the mission's other equipment remain at Fra Mauro at . Photographs taken in 2009 by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter were released on July 17, and the Fra Mauro equipment was the most visible Apollo hardware at that time, owing to particularly good lighting conditions. In 2011, the LRO returned to the landing site at a lower altitude to take higher resolution photographs. NASA reports Multimedia Apollo 14 Apollo 14 was the eighth manned mission in
Third-party evidence for Apollo Moon landings was unknown for nearly 40 years but it was rediscovered in 2010 in photographs by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and its retroreflector is now in use. Both the United States and the USSR had the capability to soft-land objects on the surface of the Moon for several years before that. The USSR successfully landed its first unmanned probe (Luna 9) on the Moon in February 1966, and the United States followed with Surveyor 1 in June 1966, but no unmanned landers carried retroreflectors before Lunokhod 1 in November 1970. Post-Apollo lunar exploration missions have located and imaged artifacts of