Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David

Author:Leonard David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Geographic
Published: 2019-05-06T23:00:00+00:00

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WITHOUT QUESTION, NASA’s long-lived Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been a game changer in the ability to inspect the Moon. On the job since entering orbit around the Moon on June 23, 2009, LRO is still making fundamental scientific discoveries. The next humans to visit the Moon will know precisely where to land courtesy of LRO imagery.

There’s likely no person on Earth who has accumulated more day-to-day face time with the Moon than Mark Robinson, principal investigator at Arizona State University of the LRO Camera (LROC). Over the years, LROC systems have yielded vivid imagery from the Moon—imagery that has only intensified Robinson’s reactions. “If anything, it’s more beautiful and more mysterious…and even more inviting than it has ever been,” he says. It may look cold, beat-up, lifeless, and foreboding to some, but the LROC images prove otherwise.

Two narrow-angle cameras on the LROC produce high-resolution, black-and-white images of the surface, capturing photos of the poles with resolutions down to about 3.3 feet. A third wide-angle camera takes color and ultraviolet images over the complete lunar surface at an almost 330-foot resolution. Images from all the cameras identify potential resources for human crews and safe landing sites for both robotic and crew-carrying spacecraft.

LROC has been used for mapping both the permanent shadow and the sunlit regions on the Moon. It has also helped estimate the impact rates of objects smacking into the lunar surface over the past decade. The Moon’s exterior is predominantly shaped by impacts of cometary and asteroidal materials—a process that is continuous. Since LRO has operated in Moon orbit for so long, the craft loops back over the same region time and time again, snapping images of the same area. These surface pictures show the rate of new lunar crater production and provide a striking picture, so to speak, showing how pelting micrometeorites create craters and modify the lunar surface.

By combining LROC imagery and historical data, cartographers have been able to create detailed maps of the Apollo landing sites. High-resolution imagery of the six landing spots, from Apollo 11’s 1969 landing to Apollo 17 in 1972, reveals the lunar module descent stages sitting on the Moon’s surface, left behind by the departing astronauts, as well as lunar surface experiment packages and parked rovers. Faint trails of the astronauts’ footprints show up, including observable tracks from the last three Apollo landing excursions as those crews rolled across the Moon’s surface in their rovers.

The LROC images even show American flags still standing and casting shadows at all the sites, except for Tranquility Base, the Apollo 11 landing site. The rocket blast as Armstrong and Aldrin departed the scene may have knocked over that flag. Some speculate the flags have been bleached white by the Sun’s harsh ultraviolet radiation, but no one really knows the color or condition of the flags at this point. Future expeditions to those sites will find out.

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