LROC represents the first time since the days of Apollo (and thus the first time ever for me) that there have been pictures returned that are below that threshold. Zoom all the way in to an LROC image and you get to landscapes you itch to explore with boots or maybe one of those nifty late-Apollo-mission dune buggies.

So LROC images have been fun to explore, but I had a problem. I'd never really studied the Moon. I studied Venus in graduate school so I'm comfortable with geologic interpretation there. There's been enough Mars missions and news that I feel like I have a pretty good grip on the broad brush of Martian geology; I understand the basics of its history and the fact that so many of the geologic processes that once operated (or still operate) there are so similar to Earth lets me use my Earth geology background to interpret it. And among the solid worlds of the icy satellites of the outer planets, there's been relatively little data collected, so it hasn't been hard for me to keep up with the state of the science. It helps that in grad school I shared an office with two fellow students who are now experts in the field (Geoff Collins and Louise Prockter) and was just down the hall from the postdoc who's now Cassini's project scientist, so I have friends who can help me with outer planet stuff.

But the Moon? I hardly ever studied it, except some brief work with some Clementine data while taking Carle Pieters' class on remote sensing, and every time I look at an image of the Moon I just know that there have been decades of research and publications on its geology and geophysics that should tell me what I'm looking at, and I just don't know about any of it. So I sent a plea for help to the LROC principal investigator, Mark Robinson, and he rounded up several people who volunteered to help bridge my ignorance about lunar geology.

For my first attempt to examine an LROC image I picked on Jeff Plescia for help. Jeff is a geophysicist at the Applied Physics Laboratory; I don't believe we've ever met but I read piles of his papers on Martian volcanoes in a class I took once on planetary volcanism. I sent him a bunch of little cutouts of the Necho crater image with questions, and he was kind enough to provide detailed answers.

The first thing I noticed in this image is the boulders. There are boulders everywhere, though they're preferentially located on topographic highs (which is in itself weird; more on that below). And many of the boulders are strikingly different in albedo from their surroundings, much brighter than the others. This and all the other crops below are at the full resolution of the LROC image, 1.05 meters per pixel. This is still only half the resolution that LROC images will have once Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter gets in to its science orbit tomorrow.

NASA / GSFC / ASU

Necho crater on the Moon

Necho is a 30-kilometer (18-mile) -diameter crater on the far side of the Moon (5° S, 123° E). Named after an Egyptian pharaoh, Necho is a young, fresh crater whose floor is flooded with massive amounts of impact melt. This image is shown at 10 percent of the full resolution of 1.05 meters per pixel; it is about 5 kilometers wide. The full-resolution image can be browsed and downloaded from the LROC website here. Credit: NASA / GSFC / ASU / map by Emily Lakdawalla

LROC represents the first time since the days of Apollo (and thus the first time ever for me) that there have been pictures returned that are below that threshold. Zoom all the way in to an LROC image and you get to landscapes you itch to explore with boots or maybe one of those nifty late-Apollo-mission dune buggies.

So LROC images have been fun to explore, but I had a problem. I'd never really studied the Moon. I studied Venus in graduate school so I'm comfortable with geologic interpretation there. There's been enough Mars missions and news that I feel like I have a pretty good grip on the broad brush of Martian geology; I understand the basics of its history and the fact that so many of the geologic processes that once operated (or still operate) there are so similar to Earth lets me use my Earth geology background to interpret it. And among the solid worlds of the icy satellites of the outer planets, there's been relatively little data collected, so it hasn't been hard for me to keep up with the state of the science. It helps that in grad school I shared an office with two fellow students who are now experts in the field (Geoff Collins and Louise Prockter) and was just down the hall from the postdoc who's now Cassini's project scientist, so I have friends who can help me with outer planet stuff.

But the Moon? I hardly ever studied it, except some brief work with some Clementine data while taking Carle Pieters' class on remote sensing, and every time I look at an image of the Moon I just know that there have been decades of research and publications on its geology and geophysics that should tell me what I'm looking at, and I just don't know about any of it. So I sent a plea for help to the LROC principal investigator, Mark Robinson, and he rounded up several people who volunteered to help bridge my ignorance about lunar geology.

For my first attempt to examine an LROC image I picked on Jeff Plescia for help. Jeff is a geophysicist at the Applied Physics Laboratory; I don't believe we've ever met but I read piles of his papers on Martian volcanoes in a class I took once on planetary volcanism. I sent him a bunch of little cutouts of the Necho crater image with questions, and he was kind enough to provide detailed answers.

The first thing I noticed in this image is the boulders. There are boulders everywhere, though they're preferentially located on topographic highs (which is in itself weird; more on that below). And many of the boulders are strikingly different in albedo from their surroundings, much brighter than the others. This and all the other crops below are at the full resolution of the LROC image, 1.05 meters per pixel. This is still only half the resolution that LROC images will have once Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter gets in to its science orbit tomorrow.

NASA / GSFC / ASU / map by Emily Lakdawalla

It's worth the effort. As Mars researchers discovered when they saw the first images from Mars Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera, and then rediscovered when they saw the first pictures from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE, there's a resolution threshold somewhere around 5 meters per pixel, below which it's as if the alien landscape snaps into focus as a physical world that one could explore with hiking boots (and, well, I guess you'd need a spacesuit too). Above 5 meters per pixel, you're looking at the world from a great distance. Below that threshold, it's like you can reach out and touch it.

LROC represents the first time since the days of Apollo (and thus the first time ever for me) that there have been pictures returned that are below that threshold. Zoom all the way in to an LROC image and you get to landscapes you itch to explore with boots or maybe one of those nifty late-Apollo-mission dune buggies.

So LROC images have been fun to explore, but I had a problem. I'd never really studied the Moon. I studied Venus in graduate school so I'm comfortable with geologic interpretation there. There's been enough Mars missions and news that I feel like I have a pretty good grip on the broad brush of Martian geology; I understand the basics of its history and the fact that so many of the geologic processes that once operated (or still operate) there are so similar to Earth lets me use my Earth geology background to interpret it. And among the solid worlds of the icy satellites of the outer planets, there's been relatively little data collected, so it hasn't been hard for me to keep up with the state of the science. It helps that in grad school I shared an office with two fellow students who are now experts in the field (Geoff Collins and Louise Prockter) and was just down the hall from the postdoc who's now Cassini's project scientist, so I have friends who can help me with outer planet stuff.

But the Moon? I hardly ever studied it, except some brief work with some Clementine data while taking Carle Pieters' class on remote sensing, and every time I look at an image of the Moon I just know that there have been decades of research and publications on its geology and geophysics that should tell me what I'm looking at, and I just don't know about any of it. So I sent a plea for help to the LROC principal investigator, Mark Robinson, and he rounded up several people who volunteered to help bridge my ignorance about lunar geology.

For my first attempt to examine an LROC image I picked on Jeff Plescia for help. Jeff is a geophysicist at the Applied Physics Laboratory; I don't believe we've ever met but I read piles of his papers on Martian volcanoes in a class I took once on planetary volcanism. I sent him a bunch of little cutouts of the Necho crater image with questions, and he was kind enough to provide detailed answers.

The first thing I noticed in this image is the boulders. There are boulders everywhere, though they're preferentially located on topographic highs (which is in itself weird; more on that below). And many of the boulders are strikingly different in albedo from their surroundings, much brighter than the others. This and all the other crops below are at the full resolution of the LROC image, 1.05 meters per pixel. This is still only half the resolution that LROC images will have once Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter gets in to its science orbit tomorrow.

NASA / GSFC / ASU / map by Emily Lakdawalla

It's worth the effort. As Mars researchers discovered when they saw the first images from Mars Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera, and then rediscovered when they saw the first pictures from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE, there's a resolution threshold somewhere around 5 meters per pixel, below which it's as if the alien landscape snaps into focus as a physical world that one could explore with hiking boots (and, well, I guess you'd need a spacesuit too). Above 5 meters per pixel, you're looking at the world from a great distance. Below that threshold, it's like you can reach out and touch it.

LROC represents the first time since the days of Apollo (and thus the first time ever for me) that there have been pictures returned that are below that threshold. Zoom all the way in to an LROC image and you get to landscapes you itch to explore with boots or maybe one of those nifty late-Apollo-mission dune buggies.

So LROC images have been fun to explore, but I had a problem. I'd never really studied the Moon. I studied Venus in graduate school so I'm comfortable with geologic interpretation there. There's been enough Mars missions and news that I feel like I have a pretty good grip on the broad brush of Martian geology; I understand the basics of its history and the fact that so many of the geologic processes that once operated (or still operate) there are so similar to Earth lets me use my Earth geology background to interpret it. And among the solid worlds of the icy satellites of the outer planets, there's been relatively little data collected, so it hasn't been hard for me to keep up with the state of the science. It helps that in grad school I shared an office with two fellow students who are now experts in the field (Geoff Collins and Louise Prockter) and was just down the hall from the postdoc who's now Cassini's project scientist, so I have friends who can help me with outer planet stuff.

But the Moon? I hardly ever studied it, except some brief work with some Clementine data while taking Carle Pieters' class on remote sensing, and every time I look at an image of the Moon I just know that there have been decades of research and publications on its geology and geophysics that should tell me what I'm looking at, and I just don't know about any of it. So I sent a plea for help to the LROC principal investigator, Mark Robinson, and he rounded up several people who volunteered to help bridge my ignorance about lunar geology.

For my first attempt to examine an LROC image I picked on Jeff Plescia for help. Jeff is a geophysicist at the Applied Physics Laboratory; I don't believe we've ever met but I read piles of his papers on Martian volcanoes in a class I took once on planetary volcanism. I sent him a bunch of little cutouts of the Necho crater image with questions, and he was kind enough to provide detailed answers.

The first thing I noticed in this image is the boulders. There are boulders everywhere, though they're preferentially located on topographic highs (which is in itself weird; more on that below). And many of the boulders are strikingly different in albedo from their surroundings, much brighter than the others. This and all the other crops below are at the full resolution of the LROC image, 1.05 meters per pixel. This is still only half the resolution that LROC images will have once Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter gets in to its science orbit tomorrow.

NASA / GSFC / ASU / map by Emily Lakdawalla

It's worth the effort. As Mars researchers discovered when they saw the first images from Mars Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera, and then rediscovered when they saw the first pictures from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE, there's a resolution threshold somewhere around 5 meters per pixel, below which it's as if the alien landscape snaps into focus as a physical world that one could explore with hiking boots (and, well, I guess you'd need a spacesuit too). Above 5 meters per pixel, you're looking at the world from a great distance. Below that threshold, it's like you can reach out and touch it.

LROC represents the first time since the days of Apollo (and thus the first time ever for me) that there have been pictures returned that are below that threshold. Zoom all the way in to an LROC image and you get to landscapes you itch to explore with boots or maybe one of those nifty late-Apollo-mission dune buggies.

So LROC images have been fun to explore, but I had a problem. I'd never really studied the Moon. I studied Venus in graduate school so I'm comfortable with geologic interpretation there. There's been enough Mars missions and news that I feel like I have a pretty good grip on the broad brush of Martian geology; I understand the basics of its history and the fact that so many of the geologic processes that once operated (or still operate) there are so similar to Earth lets me use my Earth geology background to interpret it. And among the solid worlds of the icy satellites of the outer planets, there's been relatively little data collected, so it hasn't been hard for me to keep up with the state of the science. It helps that in grad school I shared an office with two fellow students who are now experts in the field (Geoff Collins and Louise Prockter) and was just down the hall from the postdoc who's now Cassini's project scientist, so I have friends who can help me with outer planet stuff.

But the Moon? I hardly ever studied it, except some brief work with some Clementine data while taking Carle Pieters' class on remote sensing, and every time I look at an image of the Moon I just know that there have been decades of research and publications on its geology and geophysics that should tell me what I'm looking at, and I just don't know about any of it. So I sent a plea for help to the LROC principal investigator, Mark Robinson, and he rounded up several people who volunteered to help bridge my ignorance about lunar geology.

For my first attempt to examine an LROC image I picked on Jeff Plescia for help. Jeff is a geophysicist at the Applied Physics Laboratory; I don't believe we've ever met but I read piles of his papers on Martian volcanoes in a class I took once on planetary volcanism. I sent him a bunch of little cutouts of the Necho crater image with questions, and he was kind enough to provide detailed answers.

The first thing I noticed in this image is the boulders. There are boulders everywhere, though they're preferentially located on topographic highs (which is in itself weird; more on that below). And many of the boulders are strikingly different in albedo from their surroundings, much brighter than the others. This and all the other crops below are at the full resolution of the LROC image, 1.05 meters per pixel. This is still only half the resolution that LROC images will have once Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter gets in to its science orbit tomorrow.

NASA / GSFC / ASU / map by Emily Lakdawalla

It's worth the effort. As Mars researchers discovered when they saw the first images from Mars Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera, and then rediscovered when they saw the first pictures from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE, there's a resolution threshold somewhere around 5 meters per pixel, below which it's as if the alien landscape snaps into focus as a physical world that one could explore with hiking boots (and, well, I guess you'd need a spacesuit too). Above 5 meters per pixel, you're looking at the world from a great distance. Below that threshold, it's like you can reach out and touch it.

LROC represents the first time since the days of Apollo (and thus the first time ever for me) that there have been pictures returned that are below that threshold. Zoom all the way in to an LROC image and you get to landscapes you itch to explore with boots or maybe one of those nifty late-Apollo-mission dune buggies.

So LROC images have been fun to explore, but I had a problem. I'd never really studied the Moon. I studied Venus in graduate school so I'm comfortable with geologic interpretation there. There's been enough Mars missions and news that I feel like I have a pretty good grip on the broad brush of Martian geology; I understand the basics of its history and the fact that so many of the geologic processes that once operated (or still operate) there are so similar to Earth lets me use my Earth geology background to interpret it. And among the solid worlds of the icy satellites of the outer planets, there's been relatively little data collected, so it hasn't been hard for me to keep up with the state of the science. It helps that in grad school I shared an office with two fellow students who are now experts in the field (Geoff Collins and Louise Prockter) and was just down the hall from the postdoc who's now Cassini's project scientist, so I have friends who can help me with outer planet stuff.

But the Moon? I hardly ever studied it, except some brief work with some Clementine data while taking Carle Pieters' class on remote sensing, and every time I look at an image of the Moon I just know that there have been decades of research and publications on its geology and geophysics that should tell me what I'm looking at, and I just don't know about any of it. So I sent a plea for help to the LROC principal investigator, Mark Robinson, and he rounded up several people who volunteered to help bridge my ignorance about lunar geology.

For my first attempt to examine an LROC image I picked on Jeff Plescia for help. Jeff is a geophysicist at the Applied Physics Laboratory; I don't believe we've ever met but I read piles of his papers on Martian volcanoes in a class I took once on planetary volcanism. I sent him a bunch of little cutouts of the Necho crater image with questions, and he was kind enough to provide detailed answers.

The first thing I noticed in this image is the boulders. There are boulders everywhere, though they're preferentially located on topographic highs (which is in itself weird; more on that below). And many of the boulders are strikingly different in albedo from their surroundings, much brighter than the others. This and all the other crops below are at the full resolution of the LROC image, 1.05 meters per pixel. This is still only half the resolution that LROC images will have once Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter gets in to its science orbit tomorrow.

NASA / GSFC / ASU / map by Emily Lakdawalla

It's worth the effort. As Mars researchers discovered when they saw the first images from Mars Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera, and then rediscovered when they saw the first pictures from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE, there's a resolution threshold somewhere around 5 meters per pixel, below which it's as if the alien landscape snaps into focus as a physical world that one could explore with hiking boots (and, well, I guess you'd need a spacesuit too). Above 5 meters per pixel, you're looking at the world from a great distance. Below that threshold, it's like you can reach out and touch it.

LROC represents the first time since the days of Apollo (and thus the first time ever for me) that there have been pictures returned that are below that threshold. Zoom all the way in to an LROC image and you get to landscapes you itch to explore with boots or maybe one of those nifty late-Apollo-mission dune buggies.

So LROC images have been fun to explore, but I had a problem. I'd never really studied the Moon. I studied Venus in graduate school so I'm comfortable with geologic interpretation there. There's been enough Mars missions and news that I feel like I have a pretty good grip on the broad brush of Martian geology; I understand the basics of its history and the fact that so many of the geologic processes that once operated (or still operate) there are so similar to Earth lets me use my Earth geology background to interpret it. And among the solid worlds of the icy satellites of the outer planets, there's been relatively little data collected, so it hasn't been hard for me to keep up with the state of the science. It helps that in grad school I shared an office with two fellow students who are now experts in the field (Geoff Collins and Louise Prockter) and was just down the hall from the postdoc who's now Cassini's project scientist, so I have friends who can help me with outer planet stuff.

But the Moon? I hardly ever studied it, except some brief work with some Clementine data while taking Carle Pieters' class on remote sensing, and every time I look at an image of the Moon I just know that there have been decades of research and publications on its geology and geophysics that should tell me what I'm looking at, and I just don't know about any of it. So I sent a plea for help to the LROC principal investigator, Mark Robinson, and he rounded up several people who volunteered to help bridge my ignorance about lunar geology.

For my first attempt to examine an LROC image I picked on Jeff Plescia for help. Jeff is a geophysicist at the Applied Physics Laboratory; I don't believe we've ever met but I read piles of his papers on Martian volcanoes in a class I took once on planetary volcanism. I sent him a bunch of little cutouts of the Necho crater image with questions, and he was kind enough to provide detailed answers.

The first thing I noticed in this image is the boulders. There are boulders everywhere, though they're preferentially located on topographic highs (which is in itself weird; more on that below). And many of the boulders are strikingly different in albedo from their surroundings, much brighter than the others. This and all the other crops below are at the full resolution of the LROC image, 1.05 meters per pixel. This is still only half the resolution that LROC images will have once Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter gets in to its science orbit tomorrow.

NASA / GSFC / ASU / map by Emily Lakdawalla

It's worth the effort. As Mars researchers discovered when they saw the first images from Mars Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera, and then rediscovered when they saw the first pictures from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE, there's a resolution threshold somewhere around 5 meters per pixel, below which it's as if the alien landscape snaps into focus as a physical world that one could explore with hiking boots (and, well, I guess you'd need a spacesuit too). Above 5 meters per pixel, you're looking at the world from a great distance. Below that threshold, it's like you can reach out and touch it.

LROC represents the first time since the days of Apollo (and thus the first time ever for me) that there have been pictures returned that are below that threshold. Zoom all the way in to an LROC image and you get to landscapes you itch to explore with boots or maybe one of those nifty late-Apollo-mission dune buggies.

So LROC images have been fun to explore, but I had a problem. I'd never really studied the Moon. I studied Venus in graduate school so I'm comfortable with geologic interpretation there. There's been enough Mars missions and news that I feel like I have a pretty good grip on the broad brush of Martian geology; I understand the basics of its history and the fact that so many of the geologic processes that once operated (or still operate) there are so similar to Earth lets me use my Earth geology background to interpret it. And among the solid worlds of the icy satellites of the outer planets, there's been relatively little data collected, so it hasn't been hard for me to keep up with the state of the science. It helps that in grad school I shared an office with two fellow students who are now experts in the field (Geoff Collins and Louise Prockter) and was just down the hall from the postdoc who's now Cassini's project scientist, so I have friends who can help me with outer planet stuff.

But the Moon? I hardly ever studied it, except some brief work with some Clementine data while taking Carle Pieters' class on remote sensing, and every time I look at an image of the Moon I just know that there have been decades of research and publications on its geology and geophysics that should tell me what I'm looking at, and I just don't know about any of it. So I sent a plea for help to the LROC principal investigator, Mark Robinson, and he rounded up several people who volunteered to help bridge my ignorance about lunar geology.

For my first attempt to examine an LROC image I picked on Jeff Plescia for help. Jeff is a geophysicist at the Applied Physics Laboratory; I don't believe we've ever met but I read piles of his papers on Martian volcanoes in a class I took once on planetary volcanism. I sent him a bunch of little cutouts of the Necho crater image with questions, and he was kind enough to provide detailed answers.

The first thing I noticed in this image is the boulders. There are boulders everywhere, though they're preferentially located on topographic highs (which is in itself weird; more on that below). And many of the boulders are strikingly different in albedo from their surroundings, much brighter than the others. This and all the other crops below are at the full resolution of the LROC image, 1.05 meters per pixel. This is still only half the resolution that LROC images will have once Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter gets in to its science orbit tomorrow.

NASA / GSFC / ASU / map by Emily Lakdawalla

It's worth the effort. As Mars researchers discovered when they saw the first images from Mars Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera, and then rediscovered when they saw the first pictures from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE, there's a resolution threshold somewhere around 5 meters per pixel, below which it's as if the alien landscape snaps into focus as a physical world that one could explore with hiking boots (and, well, I guess you'd need a spacesuit too). Above 5 meters per pixel, you're looking at the world from a great distance. Below that threshold, it's like you can reach out and touch it.

LROC represents the first time since the days of Apollo (and thus the first time ever for me) that there have been pictures returned that are below that threshold. Zoom all the way in to an LROC image

Comments:

Leave a Comment:

You must be logged in to submit a comment. Log in now.