Articles

Mike Malaska

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.

Ted Stryk

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.

Emily Lakdawalla

I don't think there's any question what the big event of this month will be: MESSENGER is finally, finally entering orbit at Mercury on March 18 at 00:45 UTC (March 17 at 16:45 for me).

Emily Lakdawalla

Time to open the eighteenth door in the advent calendar. Where in the solar system is this brush-stroked surface?

Emily Lakdawalla

Time to open the ninth door in the advent calendar. Where in the solar system is this jumble of boulders and fissures?

Emily Lakdawalla

This was a fun image released by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera science team. Take a look at it and see if you can figure out what the significance of the red arrow is.

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm listening to a press briefing from several members of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter science team, regarding three papers published today in Science.

Emily Lakdawalla

Imagine this landscape: you're walking across an unusually smooth lunar surface, an impact melt sheet on the floor of a relatively recently formed crater.

Emily Lakdawalla

This news is no surprise, but I think it's the first such discovery I've heard of: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) team has identified a new crater on the Moon, one that wasn't there when Apollo 15 flew over.

Emily Lakdawalla

Orientale is the youngest large impact basin on the Moon, which means that very little of it has been obliterated by later impacts.

Emily Lakdawalla

There's a name for that funny hummocky texture to the lunar landscape:

Emily Lakdawalla

Speaking of spacecraft crashing...

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's the first cool pic I've managed to produce from the recently-released Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera data set.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's been two weeks since Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission released a flood of data to the Planetary Data System, but I haven't posted any pictures dug out of the camera data yet. This post will explain why.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yesterday I posted a bit of a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera image showing the tracks of the Russian Lunokhod 2 rover. Today, I can post for you an image showing the rover's final resting place

Emily Lakdawalla

I am delighted to report that within a day of the first view of Luna 21 and Lunokhod 2 since the end of that mission in 1973, the sister mission, Luna 17 and Lunokhod 1, has also been found.

Emily Lakdawalla

Today is the bonanza day for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter: the first formal release of orbiter data happened this morning, including 10 Terabytes (that is 10 million Megabytes!) of camera data.

Emily Lakdawalla

A week later and I am finally getting to the mountains of notes I took on Moon-related talks I saw at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) held in Houston last week.

Emily Lakdawalla

There are all kinds of neat things to see in this recently released image from the Mini-RF synthetic aperture radar instrument aboard Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Emily Lakdawalla

The LROC team posted today a new image of the Apollo 17 landing site, captured after Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter had gotten in to its 50-kilometer mapping orbit, so this is much more detailed than the previous view.