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Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Apollo Landing Site Images 2011 NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center
🕑 Added 2019-07-21 01:43:28 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
'NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, LRO, has captured the sharpest images ever taken from space of where three Apollo missions were conducted on the moon's surface. The pictures of the Apollo 17, Apollo 14, and Apollo 12 landing sites were taken while LRO was in what's referred to as a "dipping orbit," where the spacecraft was roughly 15 miles above the surface. They reveal the twists and turns of the paths made when the missions' six astronauts explored these areas.'
Originally a public domain film from NASA, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Reconnaissance_Orbiter
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is a NASA robotic spacecraft currently orbiting the Moon in an eccentric polar mapping orbit. Data collected by LRO has been described as essential for planning NASA's future human and robotic missions to the Moon.[8] Its detailed mapping program is identifying safe landing sites, locating potential resources on the Moon, characterizing the radiation environment, and demonstrating new technologies.
Launched on June 18, 2009, in conjunction with the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), as the vanguard of NASA's Lunar Precursor Robotic Program, LRO was the first United States mission to the Moon in over ten years. LRO and LCROSS were launched as part of the United States's Vision for Space Exploration program.
The probe has made a 3-D map of the Moon's surface at 100-meter resolution and 98.2% coverage (excluding polar areas in deep shadow), including 0.5-meter resolution images of Apollo landing sites. The first images from LRO were published on July 2, 2009, showing a region in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds).
The total cost of the mission is reported as US$583 million, of which $504 million pertains to the main LRO probe and $79 million to the LCROSS satellite. As of 2019, LRO has enough fuel to continue operations for at least seven more years, and NASA expects to continue utilizing LRO's reconnaissance capabilities to identify sites for lunar landers well into the 2020s...
On December 17, 2010, a topographic map of the Moon based on data gathered by the LOLA instrument was released to the public. This is the most accurate topographic map of the Moon to date. It will continue to be updated as more data is acquired.
On March 15, 2011, the final set of data from the exploration phase of the mission was released to the NASA Planetary Data System. The spacecraft's seven instruments delivered more than 192 terabytes of data. LRO has already collected as much data as all other planetary missions combined. This volume of data is possible because the Moon is so close and because LRO has its own dedicated ground station and doesn't have to share time on the Deep Space Network. Among the latest products is a global map with a resolution of 100 m/pixel (330 ft/pixel) from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC).
In March 2015, the LROC team reported having imaged the location of an impact whose flash was observed from Earth on March 17, 2013. The team found the crater by going back to images taken in the first year or two and comparing them to images taken after the impact, called temporal pairs. The images revealed splotches, small areas whose reflectance is markedly different than that of the surrounding terrain, presumably from disruption of the surface by recent impacts.
By September 2015, LROC had imaged nearly three-fourths of the lunar surface at high resolution...
