The Moon is covered in craters, and it’s so hard to count them all, as you well know! It probably doesn’t help that there are new craters being formed all the time, as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s constant monitoring reminds us. Another new crater was found by comparing images from before a “flash” event detected on […]
Tag Archives | lro
Moon as Art Winner
You voted, and the results are in. The most beautiful image from the Moon is of the central peak of Tycho! The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team selected the 24 most beautiful images from the mission and let you vote on the best of the top 5. That winner will become toe cover of the Moon […]
A Surprising Historical Discovery on the Moon
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) continued to dazzle us with high-resolution views of the lunar surface. It had the first camera with fine enough angular resolution to actually image the spacecraft left at the Apollo landing sites. If you are working with MoonMappers long enough, you might even come across an image of the Apollo […]
Earthrise, Revisited
The Earth rise picture from the Apollo 8 mission is an iconic image in humanity’s history. For the first time, a small group of humans saw the Earth as just a small, blue marble, rising above the desolate landscape of the Moon. For the first time, humanity itself saw how tiny and precious it was. […]
Zoom Around the Gigapan Moon
NASA just released a huge mosaic of the lunar North Pole with images taken over four years with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. This mosaic was carefully constructed with over 10,000 images from LRO’s Narrow Angle Camera with all the images having roughly the same angle of illumination. As we’ve explored here before, LRO’s orbit takes […]
Chang’e, Still There!
As the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter continues its mapping of the Moon, it can spot changes on the surface, large and small. And, it can check in on the other spacecraft exploring the Moon. A new set of images shows the Chinese Lunar Orbiter Chang’e on Mare Imbrium. As Emily Lakdawalla points out on the Planetary […]
LRO Waves at LADEE
In the last few years, we’ve had a lovely little run of spacecraft photographing each other on other worlds. There was the Phoenix lander on Mars, photographed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter during descent and after landing. Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity have all been spotted as rovers get bigger and orbiting cameras get better resolution. […]