Here’s an unprecedented look at Apollo 13’s damaged Service Module

Enlarge / Comparison of the damaged Service Module of Apollo 13. At left, the familiar image. At center: a stack of eight frames of 16mm film. At right, a high resolution scan of the original transparency. (credit: Andy Saunders/Stephen Slater)

NASA's famous Apollo 13 mission launched 50 years ago, and on April 14 the oxygen tank on its Service Module exploded. As you undoubtedly know, the mission's Moon landing was canceled after the explosion, sending the three astronauts into a mad scramble with Mission Control to save their lives. Apollo 13 inspired an award-winning, eponymous film in 1995 starring Tom Hanks as commander Jim Lovell.

At Ars, we have chronicled aspects of the mission in great detail, putting it in the broader context of the Apollo Program, as well as going really deep on what exactly happened during the mission. For this story, we have a special treat-newly remastered images culled from 70mm Hasselblad photographs and stacked frames from 16mm film.

These images were processed and shared with Ars by Andy Saunders, a property developer and semi-professional photographer in northern England who is an Apollo enthusiast. In recent years, he has spent more and more time going into the Apollo archive to dig out new details from images and film. (A larger version of the damaged Apollo 13 Service Module can be seen here.)

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