Two fantastic lunar events this morning within a few hours time. And all in real time

It truly reminded me of the excitment of the Apollo days and what we can really accomplish given the resources

kind of like looking outside the windows of the Apollo Command and Lunar modules. most reminisecent of Apollo 8 command module

ken

A copy of the original (5 AM EDT) NASA TV coverage. It's obviously copied from the original stream, and the resolution isn't all the great.
LRO Spacecraft Enters Lunar Orbit 138 MB ( 37 min long )

Download page
http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/inde...739&Itemid=

EDIT: After viewing the entire video file I doubt that many UMSF people would find much interest in this video. All that really happens is that LRO completes its orbit insertion burn.


Jack

I been in touch with NASA PAO and a replay may be available on NASA TV later today. also they very likely will post to download from LCROSS website later today also

in the meantime some pics now here:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/l...ngby/index.html

NASA TV : LRO replay is set for 8 PM EDT tonight

ken

Thanks Doug...

live video from the Moon... complete with camera jitter.

Cool indeed...

Craig

Can anyone explain the geometry to me? I was expecting a fly-by, but the image barely changes over 90 minutes.

This YouTube visualisation 5 days ago is not official AFAIK, but is more what I expected:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfwDFdunJCQ


I'm sure 'twill be all right on the day - but I'm old enough to remember Giotto, when we expected pics on the night but waited weeks for the processing.

All the LCROSS action was after closest approach ... closest approach to the Moon was around the time of the LRO orbit insertion. The camera feed started some 2 to 3 hours after c/a. So what we've seen is a departing movie from the Moon.


Me too. Still remember when suddenly no pics came back anymore ...

GIOTTO... what a nightmare... insisted my family turn over to BBC to watch the "exciting live coverage" with Patrick Moore and a panel of studio "experts"... told them all how thrilling it would be, how we'd finally get to see Halley's Comet... then the pictures started coming in and no-one had a ****** clue what they showed, or if we'd passed closest approach, or anything. Just a studio full of blank, bewildered faces. My family were less than impressed! Eventually the pics were great of course, but at the time it was a bit cringey.

Id's on [some] of the features we're looking at in the original image below.

Click to view attachment

John
PS...first posting of an image, so forgive

Thanks for posting that labelled image John, I spent a totally fruitless half hour last night trying to ID features!

Yeah..know what you mean re: identifying a feature -- I got lost at some point too :-)

I initially thought that large-ish-looking Mare on the right side was Crisium but that crater (Neper) just to its North suggested doubts, however, it turned out to be Smithii in the end -- the rest afterwards then fell into place.

John

Following the initial LOI burn of LRO on June 23, an additional four burns have been made, to put the probe into the so-called commissioning orbit. I prepared an overview of these burns below; the info comes from the http://lroupdate.blogspot.com/ website.

burn / date / time (EDT) / duration / (polar) orbit
LOI-2 / 24-06-2009 / 06:56 / 12 min / 200 x 1680 km
LOI-3 / 25-06-2009 / 06:32 / 12 min / 199 x 740 km
LOI-4 / 26-06-2009 / 08:25 / 10 min / 200 x 200 km
LOI-5 / 27-06-2009 / 08:34 / 4 min / 31 x 199 km

About a week and half after reaching the commissioning orbit, the process starts of activating the remaining instruments and start calibrating them.

LCROSS spoted with an amateur telescope: http://www.backyardastronomer.com/lcross/L...90629-anim2.gif

This morning, the LOLA instrument was turned on (not the lasers, just the receptors), and began collecting Laser Ranging data later in the afternoon !
Those data are not exactly like SLR (Satellite Laser Ranging), because it is not a two-way link, but they are timetagged at both the transmitting end (the Goddard station) and the receiving end (the LOLA receptor #1, through a fiber optics between a small telescope attached to the Earth-pointing high-gain antenna and the Moon-pointing LOLA instrument). They give an absolute range betwen the Earth and LRO (after some careful correlation and calibration), which will help improve the position knowledge of the spacecraft and benefit all the instruments (especially LROC, which turned on today for a bit!)

(see the LRO blog)

Does anyone have any news as to when the LRO will move into it's mission orbit? I assume it depends on how all the instruments are checking out, and as far as I've read, everything seems to have been working great so far. I've read in the press kit that the commissioning orbit could last up to 60 days, but I figured it could turn out to be less then that if everything is going well.

FWIW, according to the trajectory files at http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/downloads.html (LRO_Mission_Baseline_Ephemeris_v10), they should already be in a 53x48 km orbit today (Aug. 10). Not a tweet on that score at http://twitter.com/lro_NASA though.

Thank you for the info and the links. And I just saw this today on the LRO twitter. "Orbit #583 around the Moon! Still humming along in my commissioning orbit, on track for Mission Orbit Insertion end of August! :-)"

Orbit #988 about the Moon!! Final instrument calibrations as my team prepares for my Mission Orbit Insertion (MOI) burn tomorrow.
http://twitter.com/LRO_NASA
14-sept-09

http://lroupdate.blogspot.com/

LRO now in its final orbit!

Zvedichko, do you do anything but sit in front of your computer hitting "refresh" on your browser? Thanks for this and all your other tips.

I'll take this as a compliment Yes of course, I had a dinner just an hour ago . And I'm preparing to travel to the capital tomorrow so I won't be able to follow the press-conference on Thursday.

I had a lot of work today in front of my monitor, because I'm following the progress of Phobos-Grunt and there are interesting publications in the ru-net. That's why I also had the chance to check LRO's websites.

Your contributions are very useful!

Phil

With this the tool on http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/whereislro, you can see the altitude

<Display options,> Altitude (height in km) show.

You see that the height orbit is between 32 km and 72 km

Before final orbit was it 43 and 176 km.

Now wait and see the results of the high res images.