The team at one Leicestershire tech firm have been enjoying the 50 year moon landings celebrations a little bit more than most.
Precision machinery made by Zeeko, in Coalville, helped build two cameras which have captured fresh pictures of the July 20, 1969, landing site.
The hi-resolution Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera has been able to pinpoint the bottom half of the Eagle lander – which still stands in the Sea of Tranquility – as well as a camera and other equipment abandoned when Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin headed home.
It also caught tracks left by Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon.
Zeeko built two polishing machines, at a cost of more than £1 million, for the Californian company that made the camera lenses.
The pictures were taken as part of a NASA programme set up under the George W Bush White House administration to put a man on Mars – using the moon as a stop-off point.
Its surface needed to be mapped to a higher resolution than ever before – the footage of the moon landing site was a nice addition.
Zeeko managing director Richard Freeman said: “We didn’t even exist at the time of the Apollo 11 landings, but in the decades that followed there was a plan to put a space station on the moon.
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“The satellite went up in 2008 and it’s still out there.
“It’s an incredibly good camera and we supplied the prime contractor for that with two machines.
“So we have played a part in showing where the Americans landed on the moon.
“The cameras are still remapping the moon and looking for geological clues to its composition, maybe even clues that there could be water.”
More recently Zeeko provided four machines to polish key components in two super precise X-ray telescope mirrors on the Spektr-RG, a Russian-German astrophysics space observatory, which launched last Saturday.
It is heading out into deep space to study dark matter, dark energy and Black Holes – and hopefully find answers to the origins of the Universe.
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Mr Freeman said: “This is a much more advanced satellite – the real physics is being done here.
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“We provided four machines – two to Italy and two to the US – which shows just how global this technology is.
"Together they would have been about £2.5 million, which is money supporting the Leicestershire economy.”
Under Mr Freeman’s leadership Zeeko has grown into a market leader in its field, shipping around 15 of its machines around the world every year, with almost 50 staff on its books.
The 2013 Leicester Mercury Business Executive of the Year said business was good.
He said: “As long as people keep looking at space, it will continue to be good.
“We are diversifying too, now providing polishing equipment for the moulds that make smartphone camera lenses.
“We are still small, but one of the things about what we are doing is that we are providing hi-tech jobs for graduates coming out of places such as Leicester and Loughborough universities.”