It's time to give LRO its own mission topic.

Previous topic was Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter LRO countdown and launch.

NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission:

Links:

NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission
NASA Goddard LRO Mission
NASA LRO Mission Twitter
NASA LRO Launch Information
NASA's New Moon Missions Blog
Wikipedia: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
NASA TV (or NASA TV Yahoo! source or high-resolution)[/QUOTE]

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First images

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I cannot wait to see "familiar" features imaged...like Hadley Rille.

This is going to be good.

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"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

where could I search old Moon images by latitude and longitude, to compare them to these?

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-- Jumpjack --

Nice crater train (or what's it called) in that hotlinked image!

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

they are up to 15 images now.... i wonder if anyone is going to make a google earth like aplet out of them one day so that we can virtually skim the surface of the moon....

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Signature? Why?

I asked a similar question in another forum. I was told the LRO info will eventually be uploaded to the Planetary Data System and so will be used to enhance Google Moon

BA Blog: No, LRO won’t convince the Apollo deniers

The BA cites the excellent Cumbrian Sky blog: LRO and the Apollo Hoax Believers…

But, on with the science!

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In the meantime, we can do it by ourself! here it is a "basis":
http://win98.altervista.org/luna/GoogleMoon.kmz

I already asked LRO site staff to publish image data in such a way they can be automatically processed (i.e. linked into GoogelEarth), but didn't recevie a reply yet.
What is needed is, besides image center, also image width/height, or corner coordinates rather than center coordinates.

Please let me know if you find errors in my KMZ file.

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-- Jumpjack --

The current images are not map projected - they're raw pushbroom and not suitable for putting in Google Earth etc.

You can download the Virtual Moon Atlas here. It is free!

You can run it on your computer while it is offline. It is a stand alone app.

I had a very nice time between customer calls at work today browsing trough the google moon Apollo write-up. quite nice. i cant wait to see it updated with better map imagery from LRO. there are quite a lot of process artefacts in those images they have up on there now. It's easy to see that there are quite a lot of blisters in the film.

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Signature? Why?

I'm waiting for the Lunar Lander confirmations...

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

While we're waiting for Those Pictures, here are a couple of shots of LCROSS from our campus observatory last night (0221, 027 UT on 15 July). 4 minute exposures tracking expected motion from the Horizons ephemeris, within 20 degrees of the southern horizon and fighting summertime haze as well as city lights. I wanted to catch it before its inclined orbit takes it too far south, after which it spends a week or so as a predawn object. The range was about 563,000 km, and the Centaur is no bigger than a CSM/LM combination, so this is a more difficult target than spotting an Apollo enroute was. (On the other hand, nobody had CCD imagers in 1969).

Attached Images

LCROSS-15July09.jpg (83.4 KB, 12 views)

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has taken it's first images of Apollo Lunar landing sites. A news confererence will take place at Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt MD on Friday, July 17, 2009 at 2 p.m. EDT. The images will be revealed to the public then. Stay tuned to NASA TV.