It's the 60th anniversary of NASA. So what gift do you get for an organization that already landed on the moon? Landing on the moon again would be nice—but in the absence of that, I suggest a video analysis from the Apollo 17 mission, the last time humans were on the moon. We'll look at footage of the lunar module taking off from the surface of the moon.

But wait! If the humans are leaving the moon, then who is operating the camera? Great question. In this case, it was a remotely operated camera on the lunar rover placed about 150 meters away from the launch (read all the details here.

Now for some physics. What happens when the ascent stage of the lunar module leaves the surface of the moon? It fires its rockets and accelerates away from the moon (into orbit to rendezvous with the Apollo capsule). But what is the acceleration during launch? That is what I am going to measure. Yes, I am going to measure the acceleration without going to the moon and without going back in time to 1972. I am going to do this with video analysis.

What the heck is video analysis? Basically, it's the process of getting position-time data from a video. If I know the size of some object in the video (like the width of the lunar lander) then I can get a pixel-to-distance ratio. Next, by knowing the frame rate, I can find the time for each frame (by essentially counting frames). That's about it—you then get position time data. Oh, you might have to take into account the panning and zooming of the camera, but that's why it's nice to use a program like Tracker Video Analysis.

Let's get to the data. I can scale the video assuming a base width of 30 feet. After that, I can plot the vertical position of the ascent stage. Here's what I get.