Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter LRO Looking for Landing Sites

[degrangier]

the pictures used to find a landing terrain on the moon, for the Apollo missions, have been taken from a 60cm optical telescope, in France, at the 'Pic du midi' obervatory. I have personally looked in this telescope before it was removed.Even with the JAXA lro that have delivered very nice pictures from 100km high, we are still very far from allowing safe landing of a plane even in terrestrial atmosphere.

[alienmoonbase]

haha! delayed again.

Funny how we can image the tiny little rovers of mars but the moon which is only 4 days away, gets image quality of 1 pixed =500m?! 3 orbiters there now from china, japan, and india. AND the BEST images are still from the apollo missions?!

What in the hell is going on here?!

[degrangier]

You are damned right. The landing site for apollo mission have been chosen from pictures, among others, taken from the 'Pic du midi' observatory, with the 60cm telescope!

The Japanese jaxa LRO has got pictures of more 6000 meters craters.

Interested to know how they kan have landing safe on the moon. And with an overloaded computer that was not so powerful than your 5 dollards pocket calculator!

[shanghaiwolf]

the "computers" were not computers as we know them. often the calculations were manually put in, having been conjured together at houston and read over radio. in the 60s, danger was an acceptable thing. we HAD to get to the moon before the end of the 60's. Now, minor disasters or problems, terrify people. so safety is an obsession.if we crashed a crew on the moon now, the program would be halted at once.