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New views of Lunokhod 1 and Luna 17 from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/03/14 08:47 CDT
It is always thrilling to see relics of human exploration out there on other worlds. Today, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team posted some new photos of two defunct spacecraft: the Luna 17 lander and the Lunokhod 1 rover. I've posted images of the two craft before, but the ones released today are much better.
Comparing Chang'e 2 and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter maps of the Moon
Posted by Phil Stooke on 2012/02/13 10:23 CST | 2 comments
How does the LRO lunar map compare with the new Chinese product from Chang'e 2?
New Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photos show Apollo sites in sharpest detail yet
Posted by Jason Davis on 2011/09/08 11:58 CDT
On September 6, NASA released new high-resolution photos from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) showing the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 landing sites from vantage points as close as 21 kilometers.
Pretty picture: Earth and Moon from JunoCam
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/08/30 11:53 CDT
Pretty picture: Earth and Moon from JunoCam
Citizen Science projects for Planetary Science: Get Involved! Do Science!
Posted by Mike Malaska on 2011/05/12 05:13 CDT
Citizen Science projects let volunteers easily contribute to active science programs. They're useful when there is so much data it overwhelms computing algorithms (if they exist) or the scientific research team attempting to process it.
Memo to early risers: Look up!
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/05/02 11:46 CDT
There is a traffic jam of planets on the eastern horizon in the early morning right now and for the next several weeks, a prize for those of you who have to rise before dawn.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/05/02 11:26 CDT
Space.com has taken advantage of the infinitely scrollable nature of Web pages to produce a really cool infographic on the scales of orbital distances in the solar system.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/27 01:03 CDT | 2 comments
If you go to a conference about lunar geology, sooner or later you'll hear the term "KREEP" bandied about. (And almost as soon as KREEP is mentioned, a bad pun will be made. It's inevitable.) Context will tell you it has something to do with a special kind of lunar rock, but that'll only get you so far. What is KREEP, and why is it important on the Moon?
Lovely crater turns up in MoonZoo; 2 million images classified, lots more Moon left
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/18 10:48 CDT
Here's a very pretty picture to start off the week: a really gorgeous fresh crater on the lunar farside. There's nothing particularly unusual about this crater; it's just recent and fresh so there's a mesmerizing amount of detail in the feathery patterns of the ejecta that fans outward from it.
Comparing Clementine and Chandrayaan-1 spectra from the Moon
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/11 12:38 CDT
In a paper recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Georgiana Kramer and several coauthors performed a careful comparison of two data sets that seem like they're measuring the same things, so you'd think that the measurements they took would match between the two instruments. But they don't quite match.
365 Days of Astronomy Podcast: What's up in the second quarter of 2011
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/07 11:16 CDT
Regular readers of this blog will find the content of today's 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast familiar, because it's an update on what the solar system exploration spacecraft are up to, based on my monthly "what's up" updates.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/01 03:08 CDT
Here's a photo worthy of hanging on the wall: a gorgeous, 4000-pixel-square portrait of the full Moon captured by Rolf Hempel from Germany on the night of the "Supermoon."
Posted by Mike Malaska on 2011/03/29 11:49 CDT
Some recent high-resolution images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) have revealed large blocks on the lunar surface that show evidence of layers. The layered blocks were seen near the crater Aristarchus, which is a bright crater in the northeast quadrant of the nearside Moon.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/17 06:15 CDT
As I wait for the MESSENGER Mercury Orbit Insertion webcast to start, I thought I'd fiddle with some images to point out that Mercury is a bridge between the scales of planets and the scales of moons.
LPSC 2011: Day 4: Ted Stryk on icy moons and The Moon
Posted by Ted Stryk on 2011/03/17 11:22 CDT
Here are Ted Stryk's notes from the sessions he attended in the afternoon of Thursday, March 10, at the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
LPSC 2011: Kirby Runyon on Mars, the Moon, Hartley 2, and Ganymede
Posted by Kirby Runyon on 2011/03/15 01:57 CDT
Kirby Runyon, a second-year grad student at Temple University, offered to send me some writeups of selected presentations from last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, and I enthusiastically agreed.
LPSC 2011: Day 3: Moon, Mars, and Venus
Posted by Ted Stryk on 2011/03/10 11:11 CST
Wednesday morning included some interesting conversations. Notably, I spoke with Pamela Gay, who is responsible for the MoonZoo citizen science program and who is presently working on developing a site through which the public will be able to help search for potential Kuiper belt objects for the New Horizons mission to encounter after the Pluto flyby.
Explore the Moon in 3D through the Chandrayaan-1 TMC image data set
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/01 02:29 CST
Data from two of the cameras aboard Chandrayaan-1 are now available through the ISRO Science Data Archive (ISDA), a new(?) site that is being established to host the data from ISRO's deep-space missions.
The Solar System from the Inside Out - and the Outside In
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/02/18 02:27 CST
Space probes grant us perspective, the ability to see our place within the vastness of the solar system. But opportunities to see all of the solar system's planets in one observation are rare. In fact, there's only been one opportunity on one mission to see the whole solar system at once, until now.
Report from the 2011 New Horizons Science Team Meeting
Posted by Ted Stryk on 2011/01/24 01:01 CST
The annual New Horizons Science Team Meeting was held last week at NASA's Ames Research Center.
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