It’s a combination of size of the object, distance away, and resolution of the camera. There are some discussions around here somewhere discussing the resolution of Hubble on the moon, and IIRC it’s about 30 meters or so. That means the smallest items that show up as pixels are the size of a house. Those stunning “details” we see in images from light years away are HUGE.

>Come to think of it, why do we know the composition of entities gazillions of miles away but we don’t know what’s in our own soil?

Again, to what resolution are you trying to know? We know what stars are made of because they are burning, and burning produces light, and the characteristics of the light can identify the materials. But the level of detail is limited. We can analyze soil samples in numerous ways to find all sorts of things that we can’t study about stars. But without the tests, we can’t know what’s in our soil.

[stupid]MOON ANTS! Look, you can see them right there in the picture it’s PROOF! What are you, brainwashed? Obviously now they’ll be angry that we dropped a satellite onto their colony and life will turn into Starship Troopers – the movie, not the book![/stupid]

If you want to go and clear it up, though, you go ahead and do it. Try to not leave too many boot-prints.

Otherwise, you can take the phrase “dark side of the Moon” just to mean the nightside, wherever that happens to be at any particular time, so it’s still usable as a rhetorical flourish, just not so useful as an indication of location.

Actually, I’m certain we know more about our own soil then even whether there IS soil on other “entities” lol

My Questions is:

Is anyone else concerned that the moon might become our trash site?

I mean, was this crash part of the science planned to be done by the SMART-1? Or was the crash just a “neat” ending to a spacecraft that finished it’s designed usefulness? And now we have to “make science” from the experience to feel justified in trashing the Moon.

Not considering that this is one small hunk of metal on the millions of square miles of the lunar surface, how much junk can we throw on the moon before it just becomes “littered”. Is this the legacy we want to start accepting? That when humans explore space, we will be constantly leaving behind trash?

Who would have thought Mount Everest would have become so littered with the O2 bottles and trash of hikers not willing to “hike out what the hiked in” that special expeditions have gone up just to clean up the mountain (not to mention some bodies of those that didn’t make it).

I know you might all flame me as a tree hugger etc. But what’s wrong with a little consideration today for the generations of tomorrow. Why can’t my grandkids visit a moon without having to look at other’s trash?

There is also a contamination issue. What happens when we find microbes on Mars just to learn that they were carried there by Spirit?

Come to think of it, why do we know the composition of entities gazillions of miles away but we don’t know what’s in our own soil?

For some reason this reminded me of it )

“The Lake of Excellence is a volcanic plain. It lies just on the dark side of the Moon, where it is not illuminated by the Sun, but where some dim light is provided by “Earthshine” — light reflected on to the Moon from Earth.”

This is … ::looks up:: “Bad Astronomy”, right?

More like “before and during”.

This is an all-too common misconception which was not helped by the release of the Pink Floyd album of the same name. The moon has a NEAR side and a FAR side (from the Earth’s point of view). However, each side receives the same amount of sunlight over a 29 1/2 day period (except for one point which receives permanent sunlight). I’m sure you probably already know this and your comment was an oversight, but I’m on a mission to clarify this issue every time I see the words “Dark side of the Moon” when not in a Pink Floyd context (and sometimes even then!)

And the reason why the pixels would be dark, and not bright, is probably because the images have already gone through dark frame subtraction: http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/qimagehlp/dark.htm

Anyhoo, would you care to enlighten us and head off the conspiracy claims at the same time?

Notice that the reasoning for crashing the spacecraft on the night side of the Moon was for practical purposes.

At the time of the impact, the planned impact site was on the Earth-side, but a few degrees inside the current night hemisphere. This allowed for maximum contrast between the impact-flash and the unilluminated surroundings, improving the signal/noise ratio in the flash. It was hoped the flash would contain enough spectral information to determine the chemical composition of the lunar soil in that region.

Another thing potentially possible by targeting the crash just shortly inside the night region was that it allowed for the ejecta to rise above the shade and into sunlit space, where it’d then be visible against the darker background.

This was a truly awesome experience and we assumed many others had seen it and would report it. So far the images we’ve seen have been disappointing and nothing on the scale of what we saw.

Thanks,

Brett & Mindy