Philippine Blog Awards 2010Moon Map Released by NASA is Best Moon Map To Date
November 20, 2011 by admin
Filed under Uncategorized
Moon Map recently released by NASA is the Best Map of the Moon ever produced.
A highest-resolution topographic moon map was produced from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft which carries a hand sized camera that captured hundreds of thousands of pictures of the moon and the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (Lola) instrument. The shots were spliced together to show the elevation of the moon’s surface.
The LRO reveals troughs and bumps over nearly the entire Moon with a pixel scale close to 100 meter or 328 feet.
Clark Planetarium Educator Robert Bigelow said “They can study the moon in kind of a 3D way. So they can study features on the moon and learn how they formed.”
The new lunar map covers 98.2 percent of the moon and depicts the natural satellite’s surface and features at a pixel scale of about 330 feet (100 meters). A global view of Earth’s nearest neighbor at such high resolution had never existed before, scientists said.
“Our new topographic view of the Moon provides the dataset that lunar scientists have waited for since the Apollo era,” said Dr Mark Robinson, chief scientist on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), one of LRO’s instruments.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) was launched in 2009 by NASA with a budget of $504 million in a mission to map the moon in unprecedented detail. The spacecraft is about the size of a Mini Cooper car and carries seven instruments to study the lunar surface.
Aside from mapping the moon, the spacecraft has also spotted several historic artifacts of moon exploration, including NASA’s Apollo landers and the boot prints left behind by moon-walking astronauts during the six manned lunar landings between 1969 and 1972.
Persistent shadows from the north and south poles prevented the LRO to capture the moon map 100% However, another instrument aboard LRO, the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, can map out polar terrain, so the “holes at the poles” may soon be filled in.
