Updates LRO/LCROSS News and Updates

[orb]

NASA: LROC Coordinates of Robotic Spacecraft 2013 Update

LROC: LROC Coordinates of Robotic Spacecraft - 2013 Update

Luna 17, the Soviet Union spacecraft that carried the Lunokhod 1 rover to the surface. You can make out the rover tracks around the lander. LROC NAC image M175502049RE
Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

A selection of spacecraft impact sites imaged by LROC, all images to same scale.
Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University​

SpaceRef: Luna 17 Tracks and Other Spacecraft on the Moon

 

[IronRain]

Cool :thumbup:

 

[N_Molson]

NASA's LRO Moves Closer to the Lunar Surface (20 km)

One day the pictures of the Moon will be so good that every grain of dust will be visible on Orbiter's textures.

May 5, 2015

NASA's LRO Moves Closer to the Lunar Surface



The image is a visualization of the LRO spacecraft as it passes low over the moon¹s surface near the lunar South Pole. From this vantage point LRO will continue to make detailed measurements of the lunar surface, and now from its lower orbit near the South Pole will make unique observations of selected areas.

Credits: NASA/GSFC/SVS


NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has completed a maneuver that lowered the spacecraft’s orbit to within 20 kilometers (12 miles) above areas near the lunar South Pole, the closest the spacecraft has ever been to the lunar surface.

On Monday, May 4, 2015 flight controllers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland performed two station keeping burns to change LRO’s orbit. The new orbit allows LRO to pass within 20 km (12 miles) of the South Pole and 165 km (103 miles) over the North Pole.

"We're taking LRO closer to the moon than we've ever done before, but the maneuver is similar to all other station keeping maneuvers, so the mission operations team knows exactly what to do,” said Steve Odendahl, LRO mission manager from NASA Goddard.

To optimize science return, team members made the decision to change the orbit after determining that the new orbit configuration poses no danger to the spacecraft. LRO can operate for many years at this orbit.

The new orbit enables exciting new science and will see improved measurements near the South Pole. Two of the instruments benefit significantly from the orbit change. The return signal from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) laser shots will become stronger, producing a better signal. LOLA will obtain better measurements of specific regions near the South Pole that have unique illumination conditions. Diviner will be able to see smaller lunar features through the collection of higher resolution data.

“The lunar poles are still places of mystery where the inside of some craters never see direct sunlight and the coldest temperatures in the solar system have been recorded,” said John Keller, LRO project scientist at NASA Goddard. “By lowering the orbit over the South Pole, we are essentially magnifying the sensitivity of the LRO instruments which will help us understand the mechanisms by which water or other volatiles might be trapped there.”

Launched on June 18, 2009, LRO has collected a treasure trove of data with its seven powerful instruments, making an invaluable contribution to our knowledge about the moon. LRO is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

For more information on LRO visit: http://www.nasa.gov/lro
Nancy Neal Jones
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Last Updated: May 6, 2015
Editor: Lynn Jenner



Tags: Earth's Moon, Goddard Space Flight Center, LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter)

 

[Soheil_Esy]

Video of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Large PNG image
Taken by Achilleas Dimou on August 23, 2015 @ North Evia island, Greece

Details:
A large satellite orbiting the moon, i reckon its the LRO.

It was only visible in longer exposure images as the light it reflected in short exposures was minimal.
It seemed to have an eliptical orbit and was observed the next day (imaged again too) in a far greater distance from the moon.
I am checking the moon every day since but have not found it around.


The animation is preliminary since i am still at a remote location.
some frames in the middle need to be omitted but i left them in for now for frame to frame analysis.
this animation includes all frames captured (around 395 frames)

The visible movement lasts around 1 hour, from 9pm to 10pm GMT+2

Irony is that i own a 14 LX200 telescope back home and all i had here with me was a DSLR and a 300mm lens.
6000x4000 pixel wide images but no way to zoom in on the object and make it larger than 4 pixel wide.
Image has been cropped to 2000x2000 and aligned many times with PiPP increasing the threshold on each run to make it stable
but clouds confuse it and i cant process it at this location.


Another object (UFO for my limited knowledge) is located at the bottom right far out of the moon in a fixed orbit.
It is not a star since it perfectly follows the moon for an hour. (visible in animation)
It would be great if you could identify these satellites !

Animation : (low res for easy sharing, RAW quality of these crops is 4Gb, lossless compression is 850mb, 300 more than easybytez allows to upload)
http://www.easybytez.com/mzb3g9j4q5as

Thank you for your time!

Achilleas Dimou
Amateur Astronomer

THEMIS-B/C (ARTEMIS-P1/2) 2007-004B/C

The THEMIS-B (THEMIS-P1) and THEMIS-C (THEMIS-P2) were repurposed to study the lunar environment in 2009. In late 2009, the remaining fuel in both spacecraft was used to send them to orbit the L1 and L2 points, opposite the near- and far-sides of the Moon, respectively. The spacecraft were renamed ARTEMIS (Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun), with the P1 and P2 designations maintained. ARTEMIS-P1 reached the L2 Lagrange point on 25 August 2010, and ARTEMIS-P2 reached the L1 Lagrange point on 22 October 2010. Both spacecraft were then moved into equatorial lunar orbits with periapsis altitudes of approximately 100 km and apoapses of 19000 km, with periods of 26 hours, in June and July 2011.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/masterCatalog.do?sc=2007-004B

Current orbital configurations

Stage 30: Dawn Phase, VAP Conjunctions
05/13/15 - 08/30/15

In the dawn science phase the apogee of the P3, P4, and P5 orbits are on the dawnside of the magnetosphere. Probes 3 and 4 have apogees at 12 Re, and Probe 5 has an apogee at 13 Re. MMS preliminary orbital maneuvers to coordinate with THEMIS observations.

http://themis.ssl.berkeley.edu/orbits.shtml

 

[Unstung]

LROC: "Looking Over The Limb"

 

[Andy44]

​

LROC: "Looking Over The Limb"

That is a stunning photograph. Kudos to the people who reconstructed it from the instrument data.

For anyone who didn't follow Unstung's link, I recommend you do so, and scroll down to the high-res version that you can zoom in on.

I now have a new wallpaper.

 

[Nicholas Kang]

NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Survived 2014 Meteoroid Hit

NASA: Camera on NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Survived 2014 Meteoroid Hit

On Oct.13, 2014 something very strange happened to the camera aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), which normally produces beautifully clear images of the lunar surface, produced an image that was wild and jittery. From the sudden and jagged pattern apparent in the image, the LROC team determined that the camera must have been hit by a tiny meteoroid, a small natural object in space.

The first wild back-and-forth line records the moment on October 13, 2014 when the left Narrow Angle Camera's radiator was struck by a meteoroid. Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University

Using a detailed computer model, the LROC team ran simulations to see if they could reproduce the distortions seen on the Oct. 13 image and determine the size of the meteoroid that hit the camera. They estimate the impacting meteoroid would have been about half the size of a pinhead (0.8 millimeter), assuming a velocity of about 4.3 miles (7 kilometers) per second and a density of an ordinary chondrite meteorite (2.7 grams/cm3).

The Narrow Angle Camera sits on a bench in the clean room at Malin Space Science Systems. The radiator (right) extends off the electronics end and keeps the sensor cool while imaging the moon. Computer modeling shows the meteoroid impacted somewhere on the radiator.
Credits: Malin Space Science Systems/Arizona State University

“LROC was struck and survived to keep exploring the moon,” says Mark Robinson, principal investigator of LROC, “thanks to Malin Space Science Systems’ robust camera design.”

“Since the impact presented no technical problems for the health and safety of the instrument, the team is only now announcing this event as a fascinating example of how engineering data can be used, in ways not previously anticipated, to understand what is happening to the spacecraft over 236,000 miles (380,000 kilometers) from the Earth," said John Keller, LRO project scientist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

 

[boogabooga]

Interesting that we are only hearing about this now.

 

[jroly]

I wonder how long an Earth satellite would last in retrograde orbit around Earth with all the crap flying around there.

 

[Nicholas Kang]

Water everywhere!

On Second Thought, the Moon's Water May Be Widespread and Immobile

A new analysis of data from two lunar missions finds evidence that the Moon’s water is widely distributed across the surface and is not confined to a particular region or type of terrain. The water appears to be present day and night, though it’s not necessarily easily accessible.

The findings could help researchers understand the origin of the Moon’s water and how easy it would be to use as a resource. If the Moon has enough water, and if it’s reasonably convenient to access, future explorers might be able to use it as drinking water or to convert it into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel or oxygen to breathe.

“We find that it doesn’t matter what time of day or which latitude we look at, the signal indicating water always seems to be present,” said Joshua Bandfield, a senior research scientist with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and lead author of the new study published in Nature Geoscience. “The presence of water doesn’t appear to depend on the composition of the surface, and the water sticks around.”

If the Moon has enough water, and if it's reasonably convenient to access, future explorers might be able to use it as a resource. Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

The results contradict some earlier studies, which had suggested that more water was detected at the Moon’s polar latitudes and that the strength of the water signal waxes and wanes according to the lunar day (29.5 Earth days). Taking these together, some researchers proposed that water molecules can “hop” across the lunar surface until they enter cold traps in the dark reaches of craters near the north and south poles.

The new finding of widespread and relatively immobile water suggests that it may be present primarily as OH, a more reactive relative of H2O that is made of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom. OH, also called hydroxyl, doesn’t stay on its own for long, preferring to attack molecules or attach itself chemically to them. Hydroxyl would therefore have to be extracted from minerals in order to be used.

The research also suggests that any H2O present on the Moon isn’t loosely attached to the surface.

The researchers are still discussing what the findings tell them about the source of the Moon’s water. The results point toward OH and/or H2O being created by the solar wind hitting the lunar surface, though the team didn’t rule out that OH and/or H2O could come from the Moon itself, slowly released from deep inside minerals where it has been locked since the Moon was formed.