Oh my... Mare Orientale, never fails to impress...

LRO Telecon

NASA will host a media teleconference at 2 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, June 21, to highlight the results of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=33864

Craig

Anyone know where to see the figures and images they're talking about?

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news...g-20110621.html

Spectacular oblique views of Tycho's central peak!

Universe Today article on Tycho's central peak

That is one seriously cool image.

To paraphrase someone from the Mars Program, "This is not your mother's Moon!"

Man, that is nuts, a big giant boulder right in the middle of the mountain peaks. Is boulder even the correct term for something of that size? Wow!

Such resolution joined to this angle of view... Truly impressive!

This reminds me of a similar vantage point of the central peaks of Copernicus from Lunar Orbiter some time ago...

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...amp;#entry88502

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1321

Greetings Emily and all,

Do you happen to know if anyone has come up with a cylindrical version of these mosaics (along with the LOLA maps)? I'm debating whether to try contacting the team via the mission website, or to run some of my planetary mapping software to try and make such maps.

I'm starting to take a look at this site:

http://www.lroc.asu.edu/news/index.php?/ar...way-around.html

Thanks,

Steve

I know there are cylindrical LOLA maps (I have one on my computer) but I don't remember if there's a LROC/WAC cylindrical map. I would be surprised if there wasn't one though. Reprojecting an orthographic image to cylindrical is trivial though so making a new version of the orthographic views with a 'lumpy' limb isn't difficult.

Go to this link:

http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc/wac_mosaic

Click on each section. Each subsequent page has a PDS format download link. Big files! But they could be downsampled as needed. So you would get most of the Moon in cylindrical in eight sections. Then a quick polar to cylindrical for the polar sections and you're done.

Phil


PS go here:

http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc/rdr_product_select

for access to other images including the 'regions of interest'.

LROC may have spotted a long-dead predecessor.

Crash or coincidence?

This article on the LROC site shows a fresh low-angle impact site, and suggests that it may be the final resting place of the 1966/7 Lunar Orbiter 2, famous for this shot of Copernicus.

CE

I had seen that... they say the impact is too large, but it's hard to tell how big the crater is in that view - I think it's only the faint circular spot between the two dark lobes, shown in red below, and that is only 15 m across, which I think is not too bad. But we do need a lower angle lighting view.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Here's a finder image for that spot:


Click to view attachment

Phil

Update from LRO's Twitter feed:

Great to hear that ilbasso, yet more views on our solar system to look forward to this month...

Great news. I wonder how many of the landing sites they can image in that time and if they could slew the camera (aka skeet shoot) the orbiter to improve the shots.

Fingers crossed!

Sounds great, though watch out for the 21 km high mountains! (are there even any?)

It is exciting to contemplate LRO dipping down lower in its orbit than some high-altitude jets can fly. Some of the Apollo astronauts described flying over the lunar mountains at that altitude and instinctively trying to pull their feet up!

Perhaps they should release those photos immediately!

All of the highest Lunar peaks are less than 5km. So there's plenty of room to fly over them at 21km.

Given the processing required for push-broom imaging, the map projection that requires reconstructed SPICE kernels - a moderate delay is to be entirely expected.

Actually it should be going a bit faster than it does a 50Km.
I'm guessing that the difference between 1,737km + 50km and 1,737km + 20km isn't that much and hence the ~1.6 km/s is still valid.

Fascinating photo of boulders clustered within an impact crater's ejecta ray.

Beautiful. Very fresh looking, angular fractures and sharp faces to the boulders.

Here are some odd depressions, similar to those in Hyginus and on the open mare in Tranquillitatis, reported here earlier... and also similar to the famous Ina (D-Caldera). This is a set not described before, just found in the LROC Quickmap:

http://target.lroc.asu.edu/da/qmap.html

located at ( lon, lat ) = ( 19.09751, 8.32289 ). The scene is about 4 km across.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Skimming the Moon!


http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/?archives/45...g-the-Moon.html


Phil

More about this here, including new images of the Apollo 12 and 14 landing sites from about 20 km altitude.

Love the interactive versions of "before" and "after" images.

Some very interesting work has been done on the Apollo landing site LRO images over on the Moonzoo forum...

http://forum.moonzoo.org/index.php?topic=5.375

Fascinating animations! They certainly help you make better sense out of what you see on the surface. On the Apollo 11 site photo in Google Moon, the LM's shadow looks almost like there's still an ascent stage attached. In these animations, you can now see that there is a large piece of foil or shielding sticking up from the top of the LM descent stage near the EASEP bay. The reflectivity of foil bits also changes under different lighting angles, so you can better tell what is actual equipment and what is detritus. And the flag or flagpole shadows...!

Thought you'd like those

Glad you liked the flag pole/flag animations, they were interesting to do.

Yes, they are brilliant - and they appear to lay to rest the questions of whether the flags would have (a) been knocked over or ( b ) disintegrated due to the UV exposure. For some at least the flag must still be present to cast those shadows.

Phil

Thanks. Yes, I was surprised to be the first to do that (i.e. show the flags are casting shadows on their poles as depicted by animation). So often one finds out one is third (or further back) when doing anything.

Note, Apollo 14's flag can't but examined this way due to poor location of the flag and Apollo 15 doesn’t have an obvious flag shadow cast although it is in a position to be able to cast shadows that can be seen (it's pole or the flag fabric might have been knocked down). And Apollo 11's flag is, of course, down too.

What on earth - sorry, moon - would knock down a flag? Does the softness of the lunar soil around its base gradually cause it to lean?

edit: btw fantastic work on those animations! Love the site too

The LM Ascent Stage launch would knock down the flag! (or the gophers undermining the pole)

Phil

Apollo 12 'sneak preview'

Click to view attachment

Here is an Apollo 12 animation from the latest LROC
It is centered on the descent stage and flicks between 'normal' and 'high contrast'
Two of the interesting things I can see are (1) they landed in a very shallow crater, (2) one of the astronauts was moving in a serpentine motion - probably testing mobility - on the right side of the image.

(hit 'CNTRL +' to zoom with your browser)

Click to view attachment

Does anyone know if the raw imagery for the newly obtained Apollo data is or will be available? I like to do my own processing to see what I can bring out. Thanks!

As with all LRO data, I'm sure it'll be on the PDS soon enough.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter does PDS releases every 3 months, on the 15th, and each release covers data that is 3 to 6 months old.

Thank you for the replies. It appears the last updates were June 15th. Soooo...... I'll be hoping the latest Apollo data might make it in on this next update which would be tomorrow if I got that last date correct. However, not likely since it is only about a month old.

No - it'll be in the update after that.

Looks like the data is in!
http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/data/LRO-L-LROC-3....0/LROLRC_0007/

That's the normal Sept 2011 release that should include data from March/April/May/June

I've been waiting for this for a while:

Click to view attachment

Lunokhod 2's tracks at the place where it spent its second lunar night. The cross-shaped pattern of tracks is similar to tracks at the location of its first lunar night stop. I think it was using its magnetometer at the time, two perpendicular transects, centered on a small crater at both locations.

Phil

Loving it, wish I'd been around when these mission flew!

Well... I was there (as a teenager then) and the French space agency (CNES) was very close to the Russian space agency at this time. Believe me : NO Lunokhod images and NO "live" news were given by the Soviets then, even to the French who had some experiments inside. The only imaging "glimpses" we had were during the Paris Air shows every 2 years : just 1 or 2 Lunokhod images (not even the full pans) were shown on a vertical poster, printed raw (really of a bad quality) and with a text in Russian... They just did not care about Western public interest. Their only focus was to show full size Salyut mock-ups with Soyuz capsules (the best part of their exhibit) and have cosmonauts give at conferences some "political" interviews (always about their quest for peace and their non-agression policy and friendhip between the states... Yawn !). At a later stage, we even saw the Buran on top of its carrier... But still NO more Lunokhod images were shown... The space enthusiasts like me were very frustrated regarding their unmanned spaceflight results.
So, don't worry : you missed almost nothing...