NASA's LROC Returns to the Apollo 14 Landing Site

What is LROC?
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) is designed to address two of the prime LRO measurement requirements: 1) Assess meter scale features to facilitate selection of future landing sites on the Moon. 2) Acquire images of the poles every orbit to characterize the polar illumination environment (100 meter scale), identifying regions of permanent shadow and permanent or near-permanent illumination over a full lunar year. In addition to these two main objectives, the LROC team plans to conduct meter-scale mapping of polar regions, 3-dimensional observations to enable derivation of meter-scale surface features, global multi-spectral imaging, and produce a global landform map. LROC images will also be used to map and determine current impact hazards by re-photographing Apollo images.

LROC consists of two Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs) to provide 0.5 meter-scale panchromatic images over a 5 km swath, a Wide Angle Camera (WAC) to provide images at a scale of 100 meters/pixel in seven color bands over a 60 km swath, and a Sequence and Compressor System (SCS) supporting data acquisition for both cameras. LROC is a modified version of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiters ConTeXt Camera (CTX) and MARs Color Imager (MARCI) provided by Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) in San Diego, CA.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• NASA
• LROC
• APOLLO 14
• Landing Site

[redshift40]

Want to see more images of the lunar surface in unprecedented detail? Try the 3 million detailed shots from the LRO at moonzoo (dot) org

[TheSRalston]

Message to "we never went to the moon" idiot conspirationists: try to cook new garbage to prove that this mission was also false and that all this is just  not possible, LOL...

[NCHCITY]

02:30 Apollo 14 Landing Site