New image...

http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_browse/view/M103668324R

Zoom in... and in... and in... until your jaw hits the floor, or your face hits the boulders, whichever happens first..!

A fantastic new picture today, Tsiolkovsky's central peak, with approximately a zillion boulder trails...

The caption ask the question - are the blocks from the peaks, or were they thrown there by distant impacts? I think we can safely say they are local. If rocks were thrown around as the question implies, flat areas would be covered with them too. But on the flat areas away from fresh craters and slopes they are rare. And rocks scattered all over this region could hardly collect preferentially on steep slopes and summits. In fact they should preferentially collect elsewhere because most rocks falling on slopes would roll off immediately.

Phil

Its awfully nice of them to be providing these nice images with lots of boulder trails for us to ponder.

Probably not a good place to attempt a landing...

These LRO images are purely amazing. Zoomed fully in and sliding around, the images seem to go on forever. I've spent literally half an hour with some of these recent ones (especially the Necho crater) going through constant cycles of "What's over there?" [sliding the mouse] "Oh wow."

Truly amazing.

Relaese date 1 sept 09.
Image captured 31 jul 09.

When we become the high res images (0.5 meter per pixel)?

Or is there a problem with the LRO?

update excel file (see attachment)

Here we go again...

People really, I mean really, need to be more patient re image releases. Seriously, compared to The Old Days we are spoiled rotten.

Thanks, Stu. Frankly, if I were moderating I would ban this topic, because the debate is not going to reach closure in this forum.

Note that LRO is not scheduled to be put into the circular 50 km mapping orbit until 15 Sept. I haven't worked out the ground track speed in the present orbit, but it may exceed the max clock rate of the NAC for square pixels.

What's everyone's thoughts as to why lots of big boulders like to sit atop lunar mountains ? (except the ones that roll doon!)
Thanks for pointing to these fascinating close ups Stu

The topic doesn't need banning. What needs to happen is people need to stop being so ******* impatient and ungrateful. Yes, it's frustrating not to have EVERY mission release EVERY raw image taken within hours or days of them being taken, like the MER and Cassini missions do, but really, come on, we're not entitled to it, and the people working on these missions are very, very busy. MER broke the mould, but we can't expect every other mould to be broken too.

I went around JPL, saw the people working there, I know just how busy people like them are. Trust me, the people behind space missions have better things to do than make sure enthusiasts like us have a daily fix of pictures to look at when we get *back* from work. We should be grateful for anything and everything we get, and not get all narky when the flow from the data pipe slows down sometimes.

And before anyone says anything, yes, I know the argument about "Well, we've paid for them so we deserve to see them!" but that's not how the world works. "We" also pay for our governments' scientists to develop new medicines, alloys, plastics etc for us, but we don't moan and groan about not having access to their daily lab test results, graphs and meeting minutes, do we? The only difference here is that NASA's missions produce easily-understood, gorgeous pictures that we 1) we can work on on our home computers, and 2) go "oooh!" over when we see them.

No new images from LRO today? Go look at the Cassini raw page and marvel at pictures of Saturn's rings streaked with the tapering shadows of its moons. No new Cassini raw images yet? Go take a look at the SOHO site and enjoy amazing views of coronal mass ejections and solar prominences. No new SOHO images yet? Go take a look at NASA's Planetary Photojournal, where you'll find new images from other missions... If nothing there takes your fancy, go back to Exploratorium and click on some of the links to raw image pages you missed because you were busy that day, there'll be something new for you to see there. Then there are blogs from mission scientists to read, papers to download, podcasts to listen to. Come on people! The internet is a Stargate we can all step through. We're spoiled for choice!

I don't want to dampen anyone's enthusiasm for image viewing and armchair exploring but seriously, I wish I had a time machine, so I could take some of the young 'uns here back to the days of Voyager, when we had to wait literally months before we were able to drool over encounter images...

Can we move on please. Further posts on this will be deleted.

A look at the bigger picture



A previous LROC scan of Tsiolkovskiy's south-eastern, outer rim sector can be 'searched' for in these other, impressible (AND 'zoomable') moon-surface resources -- AS-M-0481 orAS-M-1324.

John

God, it would be damn difficult to scan the whole floor of this huge crater

Several other snapshots from the strips.

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