[X] My Assistant

[akuo]

SMART-1 is approaching its operational orbit. ESA has released some images of the Moon on this page:

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/in...fobjectid=36358

[elakdawalla]

Well...it's a bit of a stretch to call pushbroom imaging a "new" imaging technique. It's a pretty old technique, even in space -- Mars Global Surveyor has been doing it for many years, and more recently so has Odyssey, and even another ESA spacecraft, Mars Express, right?

--Emily

[mcaplinger]

Well...it's a bit of a stretch to call pushbroom imaging a "new" imaging technique.  It's a pretty old technique, even in space -- Mars Global Surveyor has been doing it for many years, and more recently so has Odyssey, and even another ESA spacecraft, Mars Express, right?

Technically, what they are using is what we call "pushframe" imaging -- they have an area sensor with regions of different colors, and they take an image roughly every band height's advance over the surface. Pushbroom imaging uses a single line array; this is what is used by MOC and MEx.

I won't claim to have been the first person to have ever thought of this, but I independently developed it for an unselected Discovery proposal in 1994, and we first used it in a flight instrument for the MARCI on MCO. THEMIS is the first time it was used in Mars orbit, and the MRO MARCI also uses it, as will the Wide Angle Camera on LRO.

Typical ESA press release.