LRO is about the size of a small car and is equipped with seven instruments to observe the Moon. LCROSS crashed into a shadowed crater at the Moon’s south pole in October 2009 in a hunt for water ice, which it found. NASA launched the $504 million LRO spacecraft in June 2009 along with a piggyback probe called LCROSS. “The LROC map products being released over the next week will not only serve the lunar science community for years to come, but also provide a roadmap for human exploration of our nearest neighbor,” LROC principal investigator Mark Robinson, of Arizona State University, said in a statement. Also released were higher-resolution maps of selected parts of the Moon, which were stitched together from observations taken by LROC’s two Narrow Angle Cameras, researchers said.Īnd there are more Moon maps and mosaics yet to come. When taken altogether, LRO’s seven science instruments delivered more than 192 terabytes of data in the new release - enough to fill about 41,000 DVDs, NASA officials said.Īmong the new LROC data products is a global lunar map with a resolution of 100 meters per pixel. The LROC observations are just one small part of a huge mound of orbiter data released March 14. The new image was built using data from LRO’s Wide Angle Camera, one of the three imaging tools on the spacecraft’s main Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). But basaltic volcanism was much more limited on the far side, and as a result the region sports just a few isolated maria, researchers have said. Widespread basaltic plains called “maria,” deposited by volcanic activity long ago, cover much of the near side. Since then, scientists have learned that the far side of the Moon is a very different place than the near side. The far side - sometimes incorrectly referred to as the “dark side” - remained hidden from human eyes until 1959, when the Soviet Luna 3 spacecraft first snapped photos of it. A footpath left by the Apollo 14 astronauts looked like some faint dark lines.Tidal forces between the Moon and Earth have affected the Moon’s rotation such that the satellite now only presents one side of itself to us, which scientists call the near side. The missions took place in 1969 (Apollo 12), 1971 (Apollo 14) and 1972 (Apollo 17).Īs NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reported earlier for the Newscast desk, in the first images of the Apollo landing sites sent back two years ago by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter "part of the Apollo 11 lunar module could be seen as a little dot. Equipment such as the descent stages of lunar modules and cables running to two instruments from the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package left behind by Apollo 12 astronauts. Trails created by footprints from all six astronauts during the three missions, as well as tracks made by Apollo 17's Lunar Roving Vehicle (which also appears as a small dot in one photo). Though not close-ups by any stretch of the imagination, the images do offer more detail than other photos taken two years ago by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is now circling the moon.Īs it flew over landing sites of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 missions, the orbiter snapped pictures that show, among other things: Tracks and equipment left on the moon by astronauts from three of the Apollo missions can be seen in new photos just released by NASA. The Apollo 17 landing site: To the far right, the Lunar Roving Vehicle Toward the center, the descent stage of the Challenger lunar module.
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