LROC news and images Options

[Guest_Zvezdichko_*]

I know it may be too early for such a thread, but an announcement has to be made.

The official website of the LROC camera is:

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/

A brief description plus status is available here:

http://www.msss.com/lro/lroc/index.html

[Phil Stooke]

"A little curiosity from someone who doesn't have the tools to be able to plot LRO's orbit, etc... All of the images I've seen seem to be taken under mid- to late-afternoon sun angles..."

The orbit plane is fixed. Over the course of a month all lunar longitudes pass under it. But over the course of a year the sub-solar longitude also makes a full circuit of the moon relative to the spacecraft orbit. The very first images were taken practically on the terminator. Right now the spacecraft is seeing the sun much higher over the landscape (about 50 degrees above the horizon at the equator). In a month it will be looking down at noon. Two months after that it will be seeing morning longitudes. And so on. If you look at the LROC targeting spreadsheets, you'll see they said about Apollo sites that they wanted both low and high sun images. So changing sun angles are inevitable. The two Apollo 14 images show the changing sun angles a month apart.

The same applies to Chandrayaan and Kaguya... there were specific seasons for imaging, with other times making more use of other instruments. The multispectral stuff is better done at high sun, the Chandrayaan radar imaging was, I think, done when the imaging was not, and so on.

As for Apollo 12 - be patient! (Those crazies don't even know LRO exists.)

Phil

[stevesliva]

As for Apollo 12 - be patient! (Those crazies don't even know LRO exists.)

Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy has it right-- nothing will convince a hoaxer. They're already imagining quite a lot. They can imagine a little more. Someone here linked to the Cosmic Log over at MSNBC and I was surprised to follow a link out to a breathless article about a "New Cydonia." Because of great moderation here, we don't hear from the nutcases. But they're out there. Let's not think that anything will stop them from being nutcases. What's great is that every post so far was making light of them, but trying to appease them is the last reason there need to be photos take of the A12 landing site.