Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I know, I usually wax lyrical and scientific over this picture or that returned from various astronomical and space observatories. But honestly, I don’t have a whole lot to say about this particular image, from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, showing boulders that have rolled downhill to the bottom of the 45 kilometer-wide Rutherford crater:

Except:

a) Click to embiggen.

2) I still have not gotten used to these super hi-res pictures. This one is 510 meters across. See the big rock at the top, left of center? The one casting a long shadow? That’s about the size of my yard, and I don’t have a particularly large piece of property. Some of the rocks in this image are smaller than a car.

c) Wow. The good news is, these images still do amaze me. I’m pretty happy I haven’t been spoiled yet. But as more pictures come back from LRO, that might happen. I’m only human — but I do have a large capacity for amazement. Keep ‘em coming!

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Let me show you something. And when I say "something", I mean something.

See the red arrow, and where it’s pointing? That arrow is pointing to a place that changed humanity forever. You can divide all of history between the time before and the time after what happened where that arrow points.

You see, that arrow is pointing to the spot, the very spot, where Neil Armstrong became the first human to step on another world.

Yeah.

This image is from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and it shows the Apollo 11 landing site. We’ve seen it before, but this time LRO is in its 50 km mapping orbit, so the resolution on this image is far higher — about 50 or so centimeters (20 inches). In this image, the tracks made by Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they scampered on the Moon for 2 hours and 31 minutes are obvious. You can even see the lander footpads, each just less than a meter (a bit over a yard) across.

The bright spots south of (below) the lander are various scientific packages they installed, including the Lunar Ranging Retro Reflector and the Passive Seismic Experiment. If I’ve got the scale right, the faint dark trail going to the upper left is where they put the TV camera. Somewhere between that and the lander is the flag. The Sun was shining straight down in this image, so the flag isn’t visible.

The image above is only one part of a bigger shot:

That big feature to the right is West crater. As the astronauts rode the lunar lander down to the surface, Armstrong saw that the computer was going to put them down right in the rubble field west (left) of the crater. He took control, and with literally seconds of fuel left, put the lander safely down where you see it in this image. His cool hand saved the mission; had they landed among the rubble the lander could have hit a boulder, or landed so lopsided they would not have been able to take off again.

Note the picture’s scalebar. If this were the Earth, you could stroll across this image in maybe 10 minutes. Encumbered as they were in their spacesuits, and lacking time, Armstrong and Aldrin never got very far, and certainly not to West crater. Pity; it’s interesting. Look at the rubble around it! Those boulders which almost wiped out our first attempt to land on the Moon must have been excavated by the impact, and would have provided instant insight into the Moon’s deeper layers.

Of course, we went back five more times. There was plenty of interplanetary booty to be nabbed.

I love these pictures from LRO! I’ve waited for years to be able to see images like this, and they are just as I imagined them. And they come at a propitious time, when the fate of our exploration of space is changing rapidly, and decisions on its future are to be made. It’s at just this time we most need to be reminded of what we can do when we strive for what seems to be impossible, and when we set our sights, quite literally, beyond the horizon.

Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

The hi-res Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s camera captured a pretty cool image of a (what I’m guessing is an ancient) landslide on the Moon. Check this out:

[Click to embrobdingnangate.]

The slide is down the steep slope of a crater called Marius, located in Oceanus Procellarum, a vast smooth-surfaced area on the Moon (generally called "maria" — singular is "mare" — and easily visible to the naked eye). The crater itself is pretty old; the floor is covered with the same smooth surface as the mare around it, so it predates Oceanus Procellarum which we know is pretty frakkin’ old.

The slide is very interesting; what could have caused it? A moonquake, or a nearby impact? Either way, the ground shook, knocking loose rubble at the crater rim which then rolled downhill. And just to give you an idea of the scale here, the image is 510 meters across: you could walk that distance in a few minutes. The fingers of debris are only a few dozen meters across at most! The smallest objects you can see in this image are less than a meter across.

Features like this on the Moon yield a lot of information. Better, as the LROC page notes, this feature can be compared to similar ones on Mars, giving scientists insight into both worlds.

And? It’s just really cool. Landslides on the Moon! Look out below!

This is very, very cool: The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, currently orbiting the Moon just 50 km off the surface, has taken more shots of the Apollo 17 landing site… and has seen the actual U.S. flag!

Behold (and salute):

[Click to boldly embiggen.]

Well, lookit that! It’s fuzzy and small and hard to be sure it’s the flag in the picture, but there it is. It does match maps made of the Apollo 17 landing site, so it’s definitely the flagpole we’re seeing there.

Cooool.

Compare this picture to that taken by the 16mm movie camera on the Ascent Module right after Apollo 17 lifted off the Moon; you can see many of the same features. I spent a minute looking for the rover in the LRO picture, then remembered that the astronauts moved it well off to one side, about 100 meters, before they left the Moon so that the video camera on board could record their ascent (it was remotely controlled from Earth by an operator named Ed Fendell, who had tried to film the launch of Apollo 15’s and 16’s Ascent Module but missed; with Apollos 15 and 16 technical issues prevented the ascent from being filmed, but with 17 he made it, and that’s the movie you always see in documentaries). However, you can see it in this larger overview from LRO:

[Again, click to make a giant leap.]

Incredible. The LRO page on this has more details, including comparisons of the images from LRO to ones taken in situ from Apollo 17. Remember too that these LRO images have a resolution of 50 cm (18 inches) per pixel!

Wow. Wowee wow wow.

Back to the flag, there’s a curious thing about it. The flag itself was nylon, and that tends to get brittle when exposed to ultraviolet light — which is relentless and plentiful on the airless Moon (the thermal pounding it’s taken between day and night can’t help either). I’ve often wondered what we’ll find when we go back to the Apollo landing sites; I half-expect to see red, white, and blue powder off to one side of the flagpole, and no actual flag left on the pole. This picture, as frakkin’ amazing as it is, is still just barely too low resolution to be able to say for sure, I think. The shadow is only a pixel or so in size and so it’s hard to say what’s what.

Still, Holy Haleakala. Apollo 17’s flag. I wonder what Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt thought when they saw this picture. And I wonder when we’ll go back.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Guillermo Abramson. [Edited to add: Apparently I am late to this game. While catching up on other blogs just now, I saw that both Emily Lakdawalla and Nancy Atkinson already wrote about this!]

Just a few things to link to for your evening reading enjoyment and/or frustration.

1) The Orionid meteor shower peaks over the next few days! These meteors, remnants of comet Halley, appear to stream form the direction of the constellation Orion. Check out Tom’s Astronomy Blog and Science@NASA for more info.

2) Nancy Atkinson at Universe Today reports that a scientist working on both LRO and Chandrayaan-1 has been arrested for espionage. Wow.

3) Sylvia Browne just got a book deal with Harper Collins, which includes a series of books by other authors about the supernatural and spirituality, called The Sylvia Browne Collection. Barf. The cool thing is, the linked article mentions Randi, who has been tireless in holding Browne’s feet to the fire when it comes to her claims of the paranormal. Maybe a debate can be set up on The View…?

Nah. Silly question.

When NASA slammed the 700 kg (1500 pound) 2400 kg (5200 pound) Centaur rocket booster into the Moon on October 9, the hope was that it would make a plume visible from Earth. Terrestrials were disappointed, however, when none was seen.

However, a better view was to be had by LCROSS, the Lunar Crater Sensing and Observation spacecraft, which shepherded and closely followed the rocket booster, impacting itself just minutes later. From its much closer (and doomed) location it spotted both the plume and the flash of impact! Here’s the plume:

I’ll be honest with you, it’s not much to see. For some reason, the plume was not several kilometers high as hoped, but instead more like only one or maybe two (and, it seems, blocked from our Earthly view by the rim of a crater). In the above image, taken 15 seconds after the booster impact, the plume was 6-8 kilometers wide. The fact that it was not as bright as hoped is itself interesting, however! The actual plume brightness was at the low end of what was expected, which may be due to the nature of the material it slammed into.

There was never really a chance to see the flash from Earth, since it was at the bottom of a crater blocked from our view. But LCROSS was directly above the crater when the Centaur hit, and took several images, including the one shown here right at the moment of impact. This image shows the flash in the mid-infrared, beyond what our eyes can see but where a lot of the energy of the impact went. Other images can be found on the NASA site.

The crater carved out by the Centaur was less than 30 meters across. That’s far too small to be seen from Earth (our limit, even with Hubble, is more than 100 meters in size), but the orbiting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter should be able to see it easily, and in fact did take observations of the impact just a minute or so after it happened.

All of these data are being analyzed right now. Did any of those instruments see the signature of water in the plume? Did the much larger LCROSS impact (it had a mass of 2000 kg) dig up any water? No one’s telling right now, but I suspect we’ll know soon enough. You can read more about this at Universe Today.

Update: Somehow, in my head, I got the masses of LCROSS and the Centaur reversed. Apologies, and thanks to IVAN3MAN for correcting me!