The Moon is packed with all sorts of interesting features that only come to light — literally, in some cases — when very high-resolution imaging is done. For example, the lunar far side has a bunch of small volcanoes, some only a few hundred meters across, like this one:

[Click to enlunenate.]

The image is about 500 meters across, so this is a hill you could climb pretty easily, even though the low Sun angle implies the slope is greater than 13° (remember, the Moon has 1/6th the Earth’s gravity so that would be a pretty easy hike). Those boulders on the top are weird; they only appear to be on one side, and there doesn’t seem to be anything in that direction that would be a source of them. There are none on the plains around it, or at the bottom of a nearby crater, either. The source must be the volcano itself, I’d wager. Note the crater at the top of the mound, too – you might think that’s the volcanic vent, but in fact it’s not centered on the dome, indicating it’s a coincidental impact crater.

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This is pretty neat: an Apollo enthusiast who goes by the handle GoneToPlaid has created a video comparing the Apollo 11 footage of its descent to the Moon with images from Google Moon:

That’s very cool. You can see the same features in the Apollo 11 film footage and in the newer view from Google Moon, which uses images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter as well as Japan’s Kaguya mission. The lighting was different so sometimes it makes features hard to spot in both — direct sunlight changes shadows, and also creates a spotlight effect which can hide craters and such — but you can see how well everything lines up. GoneToPlaid provides a link to the KMZ files you can use for Google Moon to check this out for yourself as well.

This won’t convince people who think NASA faked the landings, of course, nor do I really care. What I do care about is how this brings home what the astronauts did all those decades ago. Going to the Moon was hard; it’s another world, with all the dangers and unknowns and difficult terrains that made it necessary to explore it before we went, and to do so once again in preparation for going back. Hopefully sometime soon.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Scott Hall. Image credit: NASA.

Last week, NASA released new, higher-res images of three Apollo landing sites taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. BABloggee Rick Sheppe had a cool idea: why not compare these to ones taken by the Apollo astronauts themselves? In fact, by grabbing a frame taken by a 16mm movie camera on board the Apollo 17 ascent module as they left the Moon, you can compare the views seen by astronauts and LRO directly!

So I did it. I took a frame from the 16mm camera on Apollo 17, and the LRO pic of the same area. After rotating and adjusting the contrast of the original Apollo 17 picture a wee bit, here is what I got:

Coooool. The original Apollo 17 picture is on top, and the LRO pic on bottom.

If you’re curious, NASA has labeled some of the features in the Apollo pic. In that original picture you can clearly see the bottom half of the lunar module on the surface (the bug-like landing module had two parts; a lower half (the descent stage) that stayed on the Moon to save weight, and an upper half (the ascent module) that is what carried the astronauts back to orbit, and is where the camera was that took this shot), as well as several craters, boulders, and the scuffed surface tracks from the astronauts’ boots and the rover as they ambled and rode across the Moon.

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I was interviewed by WGN radio host Mike McConnell this morning about the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter pictures of the Apollo landing sites that were released yesterday. The interview is online, or you can grab the file directly.

We talked about why Hubble can’t see the landing site hardware, how the astronauts walked on the Moon, why the flags may no longer be there, why Moon Hoax stuff is silly, and so on. I had a funny moment of confusion when I was trying to count how many people had walked on the Moon, but that was quickly resolved. All in all it was a fun conversation, and I’m impressed with McConnell’s knowledge of Apollo. It’s always nice to talk to another Apollo fan!

- LRO spots Apollo landing sites in high res
- LRO spots Apollo 12 footsteps
- One Giant Leap seen again
- … and the flag was still there
- Apollo 16 site snapped from orbit

Last night, at 02:56 UTC, it was the 42nd anniversary of humans putting a bootprint on another world. Before Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon, though, NASA and the USSR sent a fleet of unmanned probes there. Since that time we’ve sent many more, including the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of my favorite spacecraft of all time. It takes amazing high-res images of the Moon… and to celebrate today’s anniversary, they released this mysterious picture:

Cooool. Click to enlunenate.

This image is about 400 meters across, and shows an impact site with two lobes of material laid down to the sides. This butterfly-shape is a clear indication of a low-angle impact; it’s seen on many bodies in the solar system including the Moon, Mars, and even Earth (though the physics of exactly how the bi-lobed patterns form is still not well understood). Features like this are very rare… but it’s known that when a satellite orbit decays, it will impact at a low angle.

As the LRO site notes, in October 1967, the Lunar Orbiter 2 spacecraft impacted the lunar surface, possibly very near this spot. Could this be the final resting ground of an early NASA robotic explorer? It’s hard to say. When something hits hard enough to excavate material, it’s common to see ejected junk of different brightnesses, and here we see the dark patterns overlaid on a brighter surface. If that’s the impact area, though, the size of the impact looks too big for the mass and speed of the probe. Maybe it coincidentally hit a brighter area, but that stretches credulity, given the darker area all around.

So what happened here? The folks at LRO are planning follow-up observations to see if they can get pictures at a different Sun illumination angle, which will make any crater easier to spot. That might clear things up.

Or it might not. The Moon is the nearest astronomical object in the heavens by far, but it also has 38 million square kilometers of surface to explore! That’s four times the size of the Unites States… and LRO sees it at a resolution of roughly a half a meter. That’s a whole lot of pixels, and a whole lot of landscape in which to hide fun little mysteries. I hope there are many, many more.

If I ask you to close your eyes and picture a crater on the Moon, I bet what would come to your mind is a bowl-shaped depression, a raised rim, and maybe a central peak. You might also picture the surrounding area, which looks pretty featureless except for other craters.

I would also bet you wouldn’t picture anything like this:

Isn’t that lovely? [Click to enlunanate.] Looking like a kilometer-wide flower on the lunar surface, it’s an unnamed crater just south of Mare Crisium, on the Moon’s eastern limb near the equator. This image, from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, spans a distance of about 2.2 km (1.3 miles) across and the full-res image has a resolution of roughly 1.5 meters per pixel.

It’s not your run-of-the-mill crater. (more…)

A long time ago, something really, really, really BIG hit the Moon. Hard. The explosion was huge beyond human grasp, and when it was all done, the hole it left on the Moon was 900 km (600 miles) across!

Behold, Mare Orientale:

This image was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Wide Angle Camera, and shows the entire basin. It’s located just over the edge of the Moon as seen from Earth, so we can only get hints of it when we look from home. LRO can see it in all its neck-hair-raising glory.

See all those radial features emanating outward from it? Those are crater chains: secondary impact events as huge chunks of debris hundreds of meters or even kilometers across were thrown hundreds of kilometers away by the force of the impact!

Yegads. You can see these better in an interactive pan-and-scan image that allows you to zoom in to scales of 100 meters per pixel. It’s incredible.

But looking at the central part itself, I got a funny familiar feeling. I read reddit, after all. Was the Moon… trolling us?
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