People might like to see this:

A collection of all useful Lunar Orbiter images has recently been added to the fabuolous offerings at the Lunar and Planetary Institute website. Here's the link:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/

Thumbnails lead to good scans. This is the best online collection of Lunar Orbiter data yet available, and it should lead to many hours of wasted time.

Phil

Whoah. This is a really nice resource. It's been a long time since I paged through the Lunar Orbiter photos. I think my favorite has to be lunar orbiter III, with its lovely oblique views. Here's one favorite. This one is pretty cool too.

Here's an Earthrise image from LO I. And another one, but not as nice, it's overexposed.

Here's another nice oblique view on some wrinkle ridges from LO II.

Though I have to say the hemispheric views from LO IV are really nice, like this one and this one (bullseye!).

And LO V had such nice high phase views...

You're right, Phil, many hours of time to waste here...

--Emily

hehe... this is going to cost my employer a small fortune...

<evil chuckle..>

Many hours? Definitely. Wasted? Never!



-the other Doug

Well there's no need to buy Phil's book now. It's all here.

Oh, I wouldn't say that, Dan. I'm still planning on dropping the $$$ for Phil's book, when I can.

But yes, the site is engrossing. I just spent a half hour locating the LOIII images of the eventual Fra Mauro landing site. The landmarks are obvious once you find it. It was nice to see a lot more of the context of the general area (Imbrium ejecta field) and identify some of the things I had heard about but never clearly seen, such as what I'm sure was Star Crater (the original primary EVA goal for the site) and the lobate, layered, almost feathered-looking northern extension of Cone Ridge.

While that site was worthwhile visiting on any of the landings, I could almost have wished for a J mission there. I see a ton of interesting depositional landforms that would expose some pretty diverse rock types, I think.

Then again, the rocks from Fra Mauro were found to be breccias of primarily basaltic gross composition. Not only were the clasts in the breccias primarily basalt, the matrices of the breccias tended to be basaltic. So while the Fra Mauro formation, a huge, almost ropy splash of ejecta from the Imbrium impact, may look really interesting, it seems to have been created mostly from basaltic mare materials that were excavated and altered. Either that, or this portion of the Imbrium ejecta represents a large pocket of basaltic magmas that were excavated.

I'm not certain that even Imbrium excavated completely through the lunar crust and down into an upper mantle of basaltic magma -- but it's not unlikely that huge magma chambers could have formed in the Moon's ancient upper crust. Excavate one of these and you'll generate a fair amount of the kind of brecciated ejecta as we see at Fra Mauro. But this basaltic composition makes Fra Mauro entirely dissimilar to the true highlands formations visited by the three J missions (well, OK, two highlands-derived basin wall mountain locations and one true highlands location). Highlands materials have a relatively poor admixture of basaltic materials, with a dominance of noritic/troctolitic aluminum-rich rocks. That's why I tend to chafe a bit when Fra Mauro is defined as a "highlands" site. It's not -- it's an Imbrium ejecta site. It's morphologically and compositionally distinct from the lunar highlands.

-the other Doug

Here's another collection of lunar resources, from LPI.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/

Phil

Thanks Phil!

This is a brilliant resource and I'm sure it will prove highly useful.

I remember the bad old days when I used to trawl through Lunar Orbiter images on NASA microfiche!

Lunar Orbiter images have a character all of their own and I'm sure they will remain relevant for many decades yet.

Surveyor 1 inside Crater Flamsteed.

That's great.

Nice to see how the close up of Surveyor 1 relates to the larger views of Flamsteed.

Several new images released by Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project.
http://www.moonviews.com/
It's really unusual to see White Rock near the rim of Cone Crater from another perspective.
http://images.spaceref.com/news/2009/apollo14.label.lrg.jpg

LOIRP releases new images.
http://lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov/articles/...four-new-images

LOII-162-H3 (505 MB) - newly remastered
LOII-162-H2 (758 MB) - new
LOII-162-M (571 MB) - new
LOV-027-H2 (1.07GB) - new

High Resolution Image of the Ocean of Storms Released
http://lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov/articles/...storms-released

LOIII-214-M (492 MB)

This is great work, but they really need something intermediate in file size between the version on the screen and the 0.5 to 1 GB version you can download... at 50% resolution with medium JPEG compression, a 1 to 2 MB file ought to be perfectly acceptable for most users. The 50% resolution wouldn't lose much detail as they are somewhat oversampling anyway.

Phil

I'm extremely happy to see the progress. These images still rock after so many years.

Several months ago I wrote to LOIRP the suggestion to use the format JP2 (with lossless option). Team HIRISE applied it successfully, there is no problem with viewing large files using the IAS Viewer. I did not receive a response.

LOIRP Releases Recovered Lunar Orbiter III Image of Surveyor 1 On the Lunar Surface
http://www.moonviews.com/archives/2009/09/...ed_lunar_1.html

I guess, specialists will appreciate: http://nasawatch.com/archives/2009/11/lunar-orbiter-i.html