Category Archives: Lunar exploration

apollo missions, Lunar exploration

LRO Rocks the Moon

Leave a comment

Humanity’s Touch on the Lunar Surface

LRO image of the Apollo 17 landing site. Courtesy NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

You know how some people refuse to acknowledge that humans never went to the Moon?  That kind of head-in-the-Earth-sand thinking is somewhat sad and delusional, since the evidence lies before us in images taken of the Moon’s surface by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Those views show the sites of the Apollo 12, 14, and 17 landings in sharp detail. We see tracks across the dusty lunar surface left as people actually walked from the landers to various parts of the landing sites.   NASA released a set of images taken with the LRO’s Narrow Angle Camera that show tracks and trails, as well as landers.  What really impresses me is that the sharpness of the paths hasn’t changed much over the years since they were made. The simple explanation?  The Moon has no atmosphere, no wind, no rain, nothing to erode the paths. And so they remain, as evidence that people once walked these regolith-rich areas and explored another world.  When will we get to do it again?

lcross, Lunar exploration

How We Look

1 Comment

To LCROSS

Earth and Moon from LCROSS orbit. August 17, 2009. Click to embiggen.
Earth and Moon from LCROSS orbit. August 17, 2009. Click to embiggen. Courtesy NASA/Ames.

Imagine you’re on this spacecraft coming to Earth — this is the scene you’d see from a vantage point of 520,294 kilometers from Earth and 880,850 kilometers from the Moon. You’d know there’s a planet there, and its moon would be tantalizingly far away… but it would be exciting to see.  If I were the alien piloting the ship, I’d be excited to see another world and, given the instruments on my ship showing the components of that planet’s atmosphere, I’d know there was life there.

Well, this isn’t a view from an alien ship — it’s the view that the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, which is on a journey to study the Moon and, on October 9, crash a Centaur rocket stage into the south polar region.  The impact should kick up a plume of dust and other materials — and hopefully some of that stuff will be hydrogen or even water vapor. If there is water there, then we’ll know that there’s a supply of ice at the lunar south pole. How much ice is yet to be determined — but if there’s a lot, it could be a useful supply for future moon explorers.

So far, the LCROSS mission is on schedule for its delivery date, despite a sensor anomaly that caused one of the spacecraft’s thruster to fire excessively. That action consumed quite a lot of fuel, but the team estimates that the spacecraft still has enough to complete its full mission. They’re still assessing the situation and trying to figure out the complete chain of events that led to the over-firing of the thruster.  For a nice background on LCROSS from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, head to their Astronomy Behind the Headlines web page for a podcast interview I did with LCROSS team member Brian Day. This is going to be an exciting mission come early October, so stay tuned!