Nasa finds moon landing tapes, releases complete map of earth

Nasa is about to unveil one of its most stunning discoveries — new and crystal clear footage of the first moon landing.

The TV images of Neil Armstrong descending down a ladder onto the moon’s surface in 1969 is grainy, blurry and dark, giving rise to conspiracy theories that the entire Apollo 11 mission was an elaborate fraud.

But people have only ever seen such poor quality footage because the original tapes containing the lunar pictures were lost almost as soon as they were recorded.

These tapes containing the high quality images have been found and are to be released next month.

Meanwhile, Nasa, along with Japan’s ministry of economy, trade and industry, has released a new digital topographic map of the earth that covers more of our planet than ever before.

The map was produced with detailed measurements from Nasa's Terra spacecraft. The new global digital elevation model of the earth was created from nearly 1.3 million individual stereo-pair images collected by Japan’s ASTER instrument.

The data set is available online to users everywhere at no cost.