A recent photo taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) shows a young impact crater in amazing detail, its half-mile-wide interior littered with fused piles of melted rock and encircled by a spray of dark streamers – the “splash” of melted subsurface material from the impact. Boulders and smaller chunks of rock are scattered…
Category: The Moon
A Look Back Home
This image shows the Earth as seen by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper aboard the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter, India’s first lunar scientific satellite. Earth’s colors appear as super-saturated blue, green and white through the mapper’s eye, which is designed to analyze the composition of the moon’s surface and help look for possible water resources for use by…
It’s a Small World
Another wonderful image from the Apollo Image Gallery, this scanned film image shows the ascent stage of the Eagle lander as photographed by Neil Armstrong, with the partially-lit Earth floating in the black lunar sky above. This is how our world looks from 239,000 miles away. Basically it would look 4 times larger than the…
A Leap for Mankind
“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” After speaking these historic words at 10:56 EDT on July 20, 1969, marking the moment that humanity first placed a foot on a world other than its own, Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong began his work documenting the lunar surface before him. The…
Eagle’s Eye View
In the center of this image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, there’s a small object casting a shadow toward the right. That object is the remaining section of the Apollo 11 lunar module, Eagle, from which astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin made history as the first humans to step foot on the moon…
What a Relief
This is a video “flyover” of the images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, riding along the moon’s terminator between night and day. The shallow angle of sunlight makes for very nice relief of the lunar surface. More on the LRO Mission here. Image/animation: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University
Lunar Landscape
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has opened its eyes and sent back its first images since establishing orbit around the moon on June 23. The image above is from a region called Mare Nubium – “Sea of Clouds” – and is on the Earth-facing side of the moon. “Because of the deep shadowing, subtle topography is…
Dark Side of the Moon
As a matter of fact there IS a dark side of the moon, and it’s NOT all dark. The recently-launched LCROSS orbiter proves it too, in this photo taken during its lunar gravity-assist orbit which will take it around the Earth several times before finally impacting the moon on October 9. This image of the…
Final Frame
This haunting photo is the last image sent back by Japan’s KAGUYA probe before it crashed into the lunar surface at the end of its mission on June 10, 2009. A tiny sliver of sunlight illuminates the rocky rim of a crater as the probe’s high-definition camera stares into the pitch black lunar shadows below….
Up, Up, and Away!
I don’t know what else to say except that this is pretty much the freakin’ coolest thing I’ve seen in a while. And you know that Lights in the Dark specializes in pretty freakin’ cool things. 😉 At 5:32 PM EST on Thursday, June 18, the Atlas V rocket carrying the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter…
So Long, KAGUYA
…and thanks for all the photos. (And amazing HD vids too!) The final hours of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s moon-mapping KAGUYA orbiter are upon us…on Wednesday, June 10, at 2:30 PM EST (18:30 GMT) the orbiter will end its mission in a controlled – but no less fatal – impact onto the lunar surface….
Moon
Seems to be an interesting film. Look for it in theaters next month. Nice lunar shots anyway. 😉 It is the near future. Astronaut Sam Bell is living on the far side of the moon, completing a three-year contract with Lunar Industries to mine Earth’s primary source of energy, Helium-3. It is a lonely job,…
Lights in the Dark 