lunar reconnaissance orbiter photos of moon

Each band in this 'venetian blinds' image is about 90 km (55.9 miles) wide.

The image below shows a raw image of the region photographed by one of the LROC cameras. The scene is at the lunar coordinates 34.4 degrees South by 6.0 degrees West.Ĭredit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University The locator image shows an area 3,542 meters (2.2 miles) wide by 14,000 meters (8.7 miles) long. The image below shows the location of these two images in relation to each other. The bottoms of both images face lunar north. Each image shows a region 1,400 meters (0.87 miles) wide, and features as small as 3 meters (9.8 feet) wide can be discerned. Older craters have softened edges, while younger craters appear crisp. This lunar farside rayed crater imaged by NASAs Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is named after planetary scientist Elisabetta Betty Pierazzo (1963-2011). Impact craters feature prominently in both images. These images show cratered regions near the moon's Mare Nubium region, as photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's LROC instrument. While these are magnificent in their own right, the main message is that LROC is nearly ready to begin its mission.' In reality, the area is similar to the region where the Apollo 16 astronauts safely explored in 1972.

'Because of the deep shadowing, subtle topography is exaggerated, suggesting a craggy and inhospitable surface.

'Our first images were taken along the moon's terminator - the dividing line between day and night - making us initially unsure of how they would turn out,' said LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe. LROC will acquire images to assess meter and smaller scale features to facilitate safety analysis for potential lunar landing sites near. The cameras are working well and have returned images of a region in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds).Īs the moon rotates beneath LRO, LROC gradually will build up photographic maps of the lunar surface. The spacecraft's two cameras, collectively known as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, were activated June 30. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has transmitted its first images since reaching the moon on June 23. LRO's first lunar images show an area near this region. I can also hope that images like the ones above, and others from LRO showing the other Apollo sites, will remind us of what we can do when we dream big, reach far, and leap very, very hard.1994 Clementine image of the moon with Mare Nubium labeled. I am of the hope that these problems are temporary: not road blocks, but speed bumps. We don’t have a rocket system to repeat these adventures, and even our ability to get people into low-Earth orbit is hampered. Right now, the future of NASA is in considerable doubt. We owe a huge amount of our technology today to those exploits. The completed mosaic measured 12800x12800 pixels or 164. For a period of a few years, time and again, we hurled men into space on a days-long journey to our nearest astronomical neighbor, seeing what humans could do, and learning vast amounts about science… and all the while creating new engineering to do it. The image is a mosaic of 1,231 separate images of the near side of the Moon taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Sound familiar? I will freely admit that the Apollo mission was driven by the Cold War and fear of the Soviet Union, but sometimes the fruit of efforts with dubious beginnings ripens into something that far exceeds the reasons for planting the seeds. It’s not obvious in the transcripts of the astronauts’ conversation (either walking to or heading back from the crater) but it looks to me that when they walked to the Surveyor site, they went one way around that small (6 meter/20 foot) pit, and when they came back they went around the other way. If you follow it to the right, it splits as they walked around a small crater on their way to and from Surveyor 3. In this picture, with the lander on the left, you can again see the path the astronauts took as they walked around on the Moon. You are actually seeing physical evidence of human beings walking on the surface of another world. … and those squiggly lines? That’s where the dust was disturbed by the astronauts’ bootprints as they walked around. You can see the lander’s shadow to the right far more clearly. LRO took images of the site in 2009, but these new ones are more detailed due to the lowered orbit, and also a bit clearer due to the angle of the Sun being lower. The part of the picture showing the lander is really something.

Lunar reconnaissance orbiter photos of moon