Very atypical picture, I can't recognize that this is a photo of the Moon. Looks rather like Mars image.
Frozen impact melt flows on the floor of Moore F, a farside highlands crater.

Oh, Lunar gullies. Dry or wet?

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/a...ius-Crater.html

It doesn't look like melt, it looks like slump fractures.

(actually, it also looks like a dirty glacier flowing over a rock bench, but we won't go there...!)

An interesting oblique view across the N rim of Cabeus crater:
http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_browse/view/M109937747

This isn't LROC... sorry! But check out a new radar image:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Mini-RF/...e_20091110.html

Phil

You want boulders? Here ya go...

http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_browse/view/M109305653LE

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That camera is incredible. Has it re-imaged any of the gullies in the old lunar pictures, to compare to martian gully morphology?

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2006/pdf/1345.pdf for discussion of Moon gullies in photos taken by Lunar Orbiter V (1967.) They superficially resemble martian gullies, which therefore (per the author) could be dry landslides.

Maybe so, but Stu, you put up a HiRISE-imaged colorization of a martian gully with an island in it. Bet they don't find that on the Moon.

Again not LROC, but I'm not sure we need a radar thread...

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Mini-RF/...e_20091119.html

Nice radar images of craters, not polar but interesting. Comparisons between these and polar shadow craters may be useful later on.

Phil

Some great new presentations about LRO among other things here:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/leag2009/...ons/index.shtml

See especially two presentations by Mark Robinson, one with high resolution LROC images of the interior of Shackleton.

Phil

A new image showed up on the LROC site: interesting debris flows and more rolling boulders.
http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/

Yes, I love the debris flows on this one, especially on the right side.

Phil

One thing from the LEAG presentations - the first LROC data release to PDS will be mid-March 2010. That will be fun!

Phil

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And very shortly thereafter, watch for Moon Zoo from some of the same folks who brought you Galaxy Zoo. Craters and boulders and peaks, oh my!

If you go to the main LROC page:

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/

and mouse over the featured image, you see that it's now referred to as 'Image of the Week' . Uh-oh - not a good sign. C'mon LROC, you can do better than that! And after I'd defended you so much in the past as well.

On the bright side, we might see some releases for the AGU meeting.

Phil

Ustrax! New Abyss ahoy!!!

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LROC NAC Image Prerelease

Over 700 NAC frames in PDS EDR format are now available for download:
http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/data/LRO-L-LROC-2...PRERELEASE/COM/

Browse (tiff)
http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/data/LRO-L-LROC-2...E/EXTRAS/BROWSE

Darn! I'm travelling and can't play with these new images. But obviously lots of goodies here. I'll get into them in the new year.

PS check out the LEAG presentations at the LPI website... a couple were added recently, including a great one by Mark Robinson with a fab high sun image of Apollo 16.

Phil

Wow... a real "Pit of Darkness"...

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I downloaded a couple of LROC NAC Prerelease TIF images but am unable to open them in Photoshop. I get a message 'Could not open because of a problem parsing the TIFF file'. Should I be able to open them in Photoshop? If not, is there a viewer I could use instead. I have tried NASA View but that doesn't appear to allow me to create layers or annotate the images.

Just use Irfan View.

I just downloaded one of the tiff browse images and used Adobe Photoshop CS2 to open it. Perhaps you downloaded it in ASCII or the download was just bad or something.

I downloaded the metadata file accompanying the new LROC release and plotted the locations of images (very roughly - only meant as a rough guide) - the things I wanted are not here but lots of other stuff is. The browse images are 50% resolution,which is pretty good. I'd love a clickable map interface!

Phil

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Nice LROC image of Apollo 16 with a high sun angle. This is from Mark Robinson's presentation at LEAG last fall.

Phil

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Mare Orientale viewed with high resolution.

1. Lunar Orbiter 4 - image 4184_med
2. Lunar Orbiter 4 - image 4195_h1
3. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter - image M102788040RE_pyr

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At last! My favorite: the floor of Tycho crater imaged by LROC
http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_browse/view/M102230053LE
Lots of interesting structures.

Beautiful! But not such a good place to drive around in..

Phil

Oh my God! It's full of ..... boulders!

And a lot of dust too. Beautiful certainly but traversing it would be quite a challenge alright.

That's a big rock.

Some of those cracks in the regolith remind me a lot of those on Enceladus (a great indication of just how fresh Tycho is).

Quite a challenge to land there in the first place.

There's a new LROC pre-release out today. I downloaded the metadata file and plotted image locations - here's a map. Most of the new stuff is over the far side, including SPA.

Phil

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I haven't done anything with it yet, but there are enough pics of the south pole to search for Chandrayaan' MIP's impact site, maybe, or possibly some of the other farside impacts such as Ranger 4.

PS I've found it useful to download the big data file, put it in Excel, strip out all the columns except the image number and one corner lat-long pair, and sort by longitude. Then for any location of interest I can look for its longitude, and find any latitude that might be useful for me, and check the image number. Then into the browse folder to find that image.

In quite a lot of the polar images I find I can see details in the shadows in LROC images. It will be good to see the LCROSS area at LROC resolution... or Lunar Prospector.

Phil Stooke

Alot of interesting images.

I came across what I like, which are side views (perhaps called limb views)....M103290270L and M103290270R;M103261640L and M103261640R. I could not find any others in the set with similar orientation.

If you adjust the contrast on these tif images, you see a slightly lighter area above the horizon. Could this be related to the levitated dust (which I don't believe has been confirmed for near the poles) or is it an artifact of the camera or even the image processing?



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Simplest explanation is internal reflections etc. within the camera. If the levitated lunar dust were that obvious - we'd have amateur astronomers seing it all the time from the Earth.

Yes, Doug - and also proper calibration, subtracting dark images etc - personally I think the dust issue is being exaggerated. In general, not in James's post.

Phil

(very crudely! hah!) stitched together some screengrabs from a wander across this rather fascinating image...

"Impact Melt Flow NE of Byrgius A Crater" http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_browse/view/M102573276L

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Now that is astonishing - it must be one of the freshest non-bombardment features on the moon? There's hardly a crater on it... it looks Hawaii.

Speaking of which, I can't recall if any "fresh" natural lunar craters have been spotted yet. Have any of the orbiters found any clearly new craters since orbital surveys were started?

I suppose you are talking about natural craters, and not those that were created by the various pieces of hardware that were crashed on the Moon on purpose by humans.
It would mean comparing Lunar Orbiter and Apollo metrics with LRO or Kaguya images.
Maybe we can try to find this crater in LROC images.

That comparison will be done, but it hasn't been done (or reported on) yet - we may get some news at LPSC.

Phil

Charbob,
Thanks for that link! I went ahead and took their GIF animation and stacked it to try to locate the strike.

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I stacked all 19 frames. My best estimate of where to look is -24.84, -19.79 according to Google Earth in Moon mode. It was hard because the curvature of the moon was difficult to handle between the GIF and Google Earth. I imagine you imagesmiths here can really goto town on it with Celestia etc. I posted a couple of LRO requests at

http://target.lroc.asu.edu/output/lroc/lroc_page.html

I didn't see any pending request for the exact area I had selected, although I did see some green markers nearby.

One thing that might affect recent crater detection is that the 'background noise' of impacts on the Moon is much higher than that of Mars: very few indigenous surface modification mechanisms with considerably less regional influence that just that of Mars' minimal atmosphere.

Still, LRO should theoretically find a few, esp. if there's to be a series of extended missions. I wonder what effect the Earth has on the modern lunar cratering rate; we're kind of the Jupiter-wannabe in the inner solar system, after all.

This isn't LROC, but we're in a lull in LROC data release while the ASU website is down. So instead, here are a couple of recent releases from the Mini-RF imaging radar:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Mini-RF/..._Herodotus.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Mini-RF/...dley_Rille.html

It's a very nice instrument. I'm looking forward to seeing the full resolution data from the LCROSS site and other areas like that - Lunar Prospector too.

Phil

The LROC website is still down, though it should be fixed very soon. Meanwhile people might find this new gallery of LRO releases (mostly LROC but including others as well) useful.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/mult..._archive_1.html

There is also a bit of raw Diviner data here:

http://www.diviner.ucla.edu/data.html


Phil

Lava tube "skylight" spotted..?

Click to view attachment

http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_browse/view/M114328462R

They showed another one at LPSC, in Mare Tranquillitatis, where the sun reached the bottom in a small area. I think it was about 100 m across and 100 m deep. Not released yet.

Phil

The second LROC release is now available via the PDS.

http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/

Phil

Phil,
Do you have any overlay maps generated for the south pole region yet? We seem to have enough images, but at least for me, my computer/Photoshop doesn't have enough memory (at resolution) to assemble more than 4.
James

No, not yet, and I wasn't planning to make one, hoping it would just magically appear instead.

Phil

Probably USGS will do one eventually. But I am surprised some go-getter hasn't done it yet. I liked the one you did from Clementine images!