Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong's secret mission completed on the Moon for NASA revealed after 53 years

Apollo 11 scientist Professor Farouk El-Baz gave Neil Armstrong a secret mission to complete on the lunar surface.

Today marks 53 years since man stepped foot on the Moon for the first time.

On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 was blasted into orbit by a Saturn V rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, along with Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, travelled for three days until they entered lunar orbit.

Then, on July 20, 1969, 650 million people worldwide held their breath as the Lunar Lander Eagle descended onto the lunar surface and landed at a spot that came to be known as Tranquility Base.

Six hours later, Armstrong jumped off the spacecraft and delivered his “one small step” speech to the millions watching anxiously back on Earth, before he was joined by Aldrin 19 minutes later.

The pair would spend two-and-a-quarter hours exploring what would become Tranquility Base, collecting more than 20kg of rock samples before they buried the US flag into the surface to signify the end of the Space Race.

But just as the pair prepared to return back to Eagle, Armstrong remembered a task he had been given by Prof El-Baz.

He had trained Armstrong and Aldrin to take photos of “targets of opportunity” outlined by NASA.

One of these targets was to find out the thickness of the soil on the surface of the Moon.

Prof El-Baz told the astronauts they needed to photograph the rim of a crater to show how far it went down before hitting solid rock.

With seconds remaining on the Moon, Armstrong ran to a nearby crater, snapped the photo the geologists needed and quickly ran back.

The photograph proved to be priceless for Prof El-Baz and his team.

At just 31 years old, Prof El-Baz became the secretary of the Lunar Landing Site Selection Committee for the Apollo programme.

Born in January 1938 in the Nile Delta town of Zagazig, he spent his early years in Damietta, an Egyptian port city north of the nation's capital, Cairo.

It was here that his love of science and the natural world was born from the colourful rocks of Mokattam Mountain.

He later moved to Cairo with his family to study geology, chemistry, biology and mathematics, graduating with a bachelor of science in 1958.

Moving to the US, he gained a Masters degree followed by a PhD in geology, but a return to Egypt would see him try and fail to secure a position there.

He returned to the US in 1967 and interviewed successfully for Bellcomm, which provided scientific support to NASA's headquarters, soon working his way into the Apollo programme.

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