![]() The astronauts' tracks as well as the rover and other items are plainly visible. ALSEP stands for Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package. Photos of each of the six Apollo landing sites photographed from low orbit by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Apollo 12 astronauts even found the first meteorite ever discovered on another world, the Bench Crater carbonaceous chondrite. ![]() Astronauts bagged 842 pounds (382 kg) of Moon rocks, which represented everything from mare basalts to ancient highland rocks to impact-shattered rocks called breccias. All the landing sites lie on the near side of the Moon and were chosen to explore different geologic terrains. LRO's orbital imagery and photos taken in situ by the Apollo astronauts will serve to illuminate our ramblings from one Apollo site to the next. Top, clockwise: James Irwin salutes the flag at Hadley Rill Harrison Schmitt collects rock samples in the Taurus-Littrow Valley Buzz Aldrin's footprint in the lunar regolith Charlie Duke placed a photo of his family on the Moon and took a picture of it Edgar Mitchell photographs the desolate landscape of the Fra Mauro highlands and Pete Conrad jiggles the Surveyor 3 probe to see how firmly it's situated. Six Apollo missions successfully landed on and departed from the Moon between July 1969 and December 1972. Given that the largest piece of equipment left on the Moon after each mission was the 17.9-foot-high by 14-foot-wide Lunar Module, you can see the problem.ĭid I say problem? No problem for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which can dip as low as 31 miles (50 km) from the lunar surface, close enough to image each landing site in remarkable detail. In visible light, it's 0.05″, or closer to 300 feet. ![]() Hubble's 94.5-inch mirror has a resolution of 0.024″ in ultraviolet light, which translates to 141 feet (43 meters) at the Moon's distance. Not even the Hubble Space Telescope can discern evidence of the Apollo landings. They're the only places where humanity has achieved one of its oldest dreams and "touched the stars".Īs you're well aware, no telescope on Earth can see the leftover descent stages of the Apollo Lunar Modules or anything else Apollo-related. But here and there among the nooks and crannies, you'll find six of the most remarkable locales on the Moon - the Apollo landing sites. How can you ignore it? You've doubtless observed craters and mountain ranges and probed for volcanic features like rills and domes. ![]() We all love dark moonless skies, but let's face it, the Moon's out two weeks a month. Earth glows blue 240,000 miles in the distance. These data are processed by each respective instrument's Science Operation Center (SOC) with the final products being delivered to the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS).Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt with the American flag. That translates into 155 GBytes per day of data or 56,575 GBytes per year (55 TBytes). Together, these instruments have a downlink allocation of 310 Gbits per Ka band pass and up to 4 passes per day. LROC is one of seven instruments on board LRO. LRO's primary objective is to make fundamental scientific discoveries about the Moon. In June of 2009, NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a robotic spacecraft, now orbiting the Moon at an altitude of 50-200 km. Photo credit: Pat Corkery, United Launch Alliance Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Launch. LROC is a modified version of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's ConTeXt Camera (CTX) and Mars Color Imager (MARCI). LROC Sequence and Compressor System (SCS) The Sequence and Compressor System (SCS) supports data acquisition for both cameras. LROC consists of two Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs) that are designed to provide 0.5 meter-scale panchromatic images over a 5 km swath, and a Wide Angle Camera (WAC) that provides images at a scale of 100 meters/pixel in seven color bands over a 60 km swath. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, is a system of three cameras mounted on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that capture high resolution black and white images and moderate resolution multi-spectral images of the lunar surface.
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