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NASA Begins Work on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
soldeed writes "Space.com is reporting the beginning of construction on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Which is scheduled for launch in late fall of 2008. It will orbit the moon at fifty kilometers and image the entire surface at high resolution. A far Ultraviolet instrument will enable it to see into areas permanently in shadow and see if there is indeed ice there. LRO will count craters and image American and Soviet landing sites."
NASA World Wind, which is quite similar to Google Earth, also has Moons and stars etc. You can also "drive" across a landscape, following it's contours, rather than just having fly-bys that don't give a sense of the real heights etc. It's more focused on educational uses, and open source too. All in all, a very interesting alternative to google earth. I wish the two projects would collaborate.
Having said all that, I get weird "application error" messages with the latest version. Seems to work for most people though. Anyone figured this out yet?
2 Things
1. TFA from 2 days ago mentioned the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter (today's TFA)
2. Where do you get the left hand not knowing what the right is doing bit?
The whole point of the LRO is to map the moon so they can decide where they want to land future missions.
AFAIK NASA generally doesn't copyright any of the images or data from their missions(Hubble might be an exception though, atleast for the first year). More info here.
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Well LRO is the first phase of RLEP, the Robotic Lunar Exploration Program. The next phase after LRO (IIRC) is a robotic lander.
Mohttp://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Government agencies are not allowed to hold copyrights. If the images belonged to a third party that NASA contracted out to, then you might have an issue. Fortuanetly, it's usually NASA's mission to get those photos, so they belong to NASA even if NASA contract for the space vehicle to be built by someone else.
NASA's page on the subject.
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http://moon.google.com/
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You can get the details of the spacecraft from Goddard Space Flight Center.
I don't think so - the remnants of the landings site are almost certainly in pristine condition. The moon has (essentially) no atmosphere for winds to blow around, and no atmospheric dust to settle on the site. There are no corrosives to eat away at the remaining equipment - principally the lower half of the LEM. Earthquakes are pretty weak and rare, so there is basically no chance that the sites have been swallowed up.
I can think of only two mechanisms that could bring about wholesale changes to the sites. First a large meteor could have landed on or near the landing site and obliterated it, or covered it with debris. An impact like that would require a substantially-sized meteor - I'd guess on the order of 10 kg. Those kinds of impacts are rare enough as it is, and the chances of any one Apollo site being hit with one are miniscule, let alone all 6. Second, the intense radiation has weakened the man-made objects left behind to the point that they have crumbled to dust. This may be true of the plastics, but the metal remains would be nearly impervious to it, at least on the timescale of decades.
The lunar explorations (robotic and manned) have proven that the Moon's surface does not change quickly. The Apollo astronauts fully expected that their footprints would still be visible in the dust thousands of years from now. In a million years, there may indeed be nothing left of the Apollo sites. On the whole, however, the Moon's surface has not changed during the whole timescale of human civilization.
Imagine a crater, well away from the equator. If the walls are high enough, there will be places on the side nearest the equator that the Sun never reaches, and are in permanent shadow. You also get the same effect on the "back side" of mountains.
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Last time I checked, the Moon orbits the Earth in such a way that the same side of it always faces Earth, however, during a solar eclipse, the side of the Moon that faces away from Earth faces the Sun, so how are there places on the Moon that are "permanently in shadow?"
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon, the Moon's axial tilt is only 3.6 to 6.69 degrees. So at the poles, there could be spots in deep craters that never get sunlight.
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Who said anything about men? The Soviets safely landed seven probes of the Luna series, and a whole lot more... uh... impacted destructively. Details can be found on NASA's web site here:s sr.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunaru
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From the LROC site http://cps.earth.northwestern.edu/LROC/summary.htm l
"All the data collected from the LROC will be transferred to the Planetary Data Systems (PDS). In all, about 62 terabytes (TB) of data will be sent to PDS from the data collected by LROC including the raw images in the original spacecraft viewing orientation (NASA Level-0) and radiometrically processed images (NASA Level-1) of the entire image collection. In addition, geometrically processed images (NASA Level-1C) from a subset of the image collection and uncontrolled mosaics from a subset of the image collection will also be transferred to the PDS."
The PDS ( http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/ ) "archives and distributes scientific data from NASA planetary missions..."
You can download data from many past missions from the PDS.
Earthquakes are pretty weak and rare Yeah you're right, they are pretty rare on the moon.