NASA risks crashing spacecraft for close-up pics of Apollo sites
It still blows my mind that people (like this guy) have walked on the freakin' Moon, and I'm not the only one: NASA has sent its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter dangerously low to snap some new pics of astronaut footprints on the surface of another little world.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been imaging the lunar surface from an altitude of about 30 miles up since 2009, and the spacecraft has collected hundreds of terabytes of data. Good data. Very good data. But not good enough for those crazy kids over at NASA, who decided to cut LRO's imaging altitude in half, from 30 miles above the lunar surface down to 15 miles.
Lower (closer to the surface, in other words) is way better, as far as taking pics is concerned, but at 15 miles, variations in the density of the Moon start to tug unevenly on the spacecraft, and if it stayed down that low, the orbiter would eventually crash. NASA decided to send LRO down for a little bit anyway, specifically to take some new, ultra high-res pictures of the Apollo landing sites.
The images in the gallery below show the Apollo 11, 12, and 15 landing sites at resolutions as high as 25 centimeters (about 9 inches) per pixel with captions from the LRO camera team. You can see lunar module descent stages, rovers, leftover equipment, and even footprints left by the astronautes. On the Moon, man. The Moon.
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Apollo 11 LROC's best look yet at the Apollo 11 Landing site. The remnants of Armstrong and Aldrin's historic first steps on the surface are seen as dark paths around the Lunar Module (LM), Lunar Ranging RetroReflector (LRRR) and Passive Seismic Experiment Package (PSEP), as well as leading to and from Little West crater.
Apollo 12 Here, you can see the remnants of not one, but two missions to the Moon. Astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean demonstrated that a precision lunar landing with the Apollo system was possible, enabling all of the targeted landings that followed. Bean and Conrad collected rock samples and made field observations, which resulted in key discoveries about lunar geology. They also collected and returned components from the nearby US Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which landed at this site almost two and half years previously, providing important information to engineers about the how materials survive in the lunar environment.
Apollo 15 Apollo 15 landing site. The Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) is parked to the far right, and the Lunar Module descent stage is in the center, LRV tracks indicated with arrows.
