"Where were you on July 20, 1969?"

Everybody knows that the first man on the moon -- Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Amstrong, is an alumnus of Purdue University in West Lafayette, right? It's been 40 years since he climbed out of the lunar excursion module ("The Eagle has landed.")on 20 July 1969. He put one foot onto the surface of the Moon and said, simply: "It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Among the items left behind (on purpose) is a memorial for the three American astronauts and two Soviet cosmonauts who had lost their lives in earlier space exploration. One of the Americans was another Hoosier: Virgil "Gus" Grissom, who (with the two other astronauts from Apollo 1) died in a fire aboard the spacecraft's command module during a training exercise on 27 January 1967.

Purdue, of course, remembers. According to the Purdue news bureau, mementos, artifacts and personal papers from Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan and other Purdue astronaut alumni will be on display through 30 October 2009 as the university celebrates its rich space heritage and the 40th anniversary of the historic first walk on the moon.

Purdue Libraries' Archives and Special Collections will present the exhibit, titled "Purdue's Place in Space: From the Midwest to the Moon." The exhibit, which is free and open to the public, will be on display in the new Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives & Special Collections Research Center on the fourth floor of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education Library in Stewart Center on the West Lafayette campus.

By the way, that weird numbered item in the photo is a slide rule -- dating from the days before calculators took over computations.

See also: this (on Mashable).

In addition, parts of the spacecraft were made at the Allison plant in Indianapolis (now part of Rolls Royce).