40 Years Later, Another Look At Apollo Sites
June 22nd, 2009
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In case you were not aware, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched just a few days ago and is presently on its way to the moon. The unmanned spacecraft is expected to reach lunar orbit tomorrow (Tuesday) at which point it will begin sending back live video and pictures of the moon. There have been other probes sent to orbit the moon in the past few years, including the Japanese SELENE, the Indian Moon Impact Probe and the 1998 Lunar Prospector probe. However, what makes the LRO unique is that it will take the first high resolution images of the lunar surface since the Apollo Program.
The probe will come within 50 km of the lunar surface, a very low orbital altitude and is expected to return images with a resolution of aproximately .5 meters per pixel. This kind of imagry will rival the high resolution images avaliable of the earth from services like Google Earth. With such high resolution images, objects like the descent stages from Apollo missions as well as other objects such as the Lunar Rovers, used on later missions should be plainly visible and recognizable.
NASA has stated that they do plan on imaging the sites of the Apollo landings and hope to have some high quality images available in time for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo-11 landing, which is just a month away! This should make for some very interesting viewing, not only of the Apollo-11 landing site, but also of later Apollo landings, which left more hardware behind and produced several miles of rover tracks. It will also be interesting to see if there is anything recognizable left of the S-IVB upper stages that were intentionally crashed into the lunar surface to produce seismic data.
Of course, this half-billion dollar mission was not launched simply to image the old lunar landing sites. While the images will be a great tribute to the 40th anniversary of the missions, they are not the real science objective of the mission. The probe is intended as the first portion of a lunar exploration program that will eventually include manned missions. The Lunar Precursor Robotic Program is a planned series of missions which the LRO is only the first of. The primary objective of the probe is to scout out possible landing sites for unmanned and later manned spacecraft. 
The probe also carries a second spacecraft, the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite or LCOSS, which is riding piggyback on the primary imaging probe. The smaller LCOSS will be ejected from the main orbiter shortly before the imapct of the vehicle’s spent Centaur rocket stage into the lunar surface. The impact of the stage is expected to eject a large plume of material which LCOSS will fly through in order to preform direct sampling and analysis. What NASA is most interested in is determining whether the lunar poles may contain water ice. It is hoped that LCOSS will provide a definitive answer to this.
The impact won’t be until this fall, but it may be visible from earth to amateur astronomers, although probably not with the naked eye.
I’d like to think this mission will finally get the various Apollo-hoax idiots to shut up, but that seems unlikely. Since the probe is launched by NASA, they will likely just claim it’s more effort to fake the landings by returning made fake images. My psychic senses tell me that in the near future we will see these photographs dissected by people who don’t know the first thing about optics or space exploration. This will be used to bolster conspiracy claims by setting the images and bogus analysis to hardcore music in crudely edited videos which will be posted on Youtube.
(okay, that’s not psychic at all)
This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Culture, Good Science, Misc, Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 23rd, 2009 at 12:33 am
Although the human stuff on the moon is not the scientifically important part of the mission, it will be very interesting to see the Apollo landing sites as well as the Russian probes and stuff. It will also be interesting to see some of the Soviet probes and unmanned moon stuff. I know at least one of the probes sent to the moon by the Soviets failed just before landing and the reason is unknown. They think it might have hit a mountain. Maybe this could tell if there is a crater and crash site there.
It won’t convince conspiracy theorists. Even if a country other than the US sent back pics from a probe, they’d come up with some explanation of how NASA paid them off or something. Even if you took them there, they’d say it is fake. Those people are just desperate to confirm their own beliefs.
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June 23rd, 2009 at 1:11 am
The cranks have taken it to an entirely new level:
NASA moon bombing violates space law & may cause conflict with lunar ET/UFO civilizations
The NASA moon bombing, a component of the LCROSS mission, may also trigger conflict with known extraterrestrial civilizations on the moon!!!
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June 23rd, 2009 at 2:11 am
DV82XL said:
The apparently didn’t care about all the Apollo spent stages crashed into the moon (much larger by the way). They didn’t care when the US or the USSR were crashing probes into the moon either (many of the first probes didn’t make soft landings, they hurled into the moon and transmitted data till they hit the surface).
It’s fairly common to crash scientific spacecraft into objects once they reach the end of their useful life or if there is a left over spent stage. Sometimes they do it to stop the spacecraft from contaminating something or getting in the way and sometimes it is done to generate scientific data.
No way this is not “peaceful” and ET civilizations? OH PUH-LEASE!
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June 23rd, 2009 at 4:23 am
Some of the eco-fruit cakes are visibly shaffing at the idea of ‘littering’ on the moon too.
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June 23rd, 2009 at 8:54 am
There is actually a good scientific and/or practical reason to image the lunar lander areas early in the mission. We know the exact size and shape of the descent stage so it would be a good way to assess and calibrate the cameras on the probe. I’m not sure if this is really a necessity or anything, but they make good targets for that.
Exciting mission for sure, not just because of the imaging of the manmade stuff (which is going to be really cool) but I’m sure all kinds of interesting features and topography will be found.
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June 23rd, 2009 at 9:27 am
Engineering Edgar said:
That’s a good point I had not thought of. When earth imaging satellites are launched the first things they image are often test targets designed to verify the acuracy of their optics and gauge their real resolution. Out in the western US there are a bunch of lines and patterns of various sizes which are used to assess satellite and air imaging.
It’s probably not critical that they have a known target to do this with on the probe but it could be handy for that.
(Of course this is speculative)
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June 23rd, 2009 at 10:15 pm
drbuzz0 said:
The process is called getting control and it’s a vital part of photo-reconnaissance. My neighbor spent WWII doing this in England using things like rail gage and such to scale photographs taken from the air.
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June 24th, 2009 at 10:42 am
This will be a very exciting mission. It will sure be great to see those landers and lunar experiments. I bet there will be a lot of interesting details of the surface too.
One thing that I think would be really interesting is to look at the detailed pictures and then compare them to ones taken 40 years ago and see if there are any changes in the surface like from the constant impacts of tiny meteors and stuff. They say the moon stays very stable, but it’d be really interesting to see if they find any small craters that were not there and how many of them are found.
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July 3rd, 2009 at 1:48 am
Actually, I ran into a high level Network Admin at Tektronix once that claimed we never went to the moon. So I asked, how did Tektronix fare in not building all the test equipment required to make such a rocket and calibrate hundred of o-scopes for such a purpose?
Besides, there is a mirror left on the moon that which they shine a laser on to measure the distance to see what the orbital mechanics are looking like for the moon periodically. I can’t remember which Apollo mission it was. 15? The guy was a jerk in an IT staff meeting trying to get me riled up.
The LRO sight actually has a web page which you can request a target area of the moon to be imaged in several modes. Requests are open to the public and the images will be produced in the catalog of public domain access.
http://target.lroc.asu.edu/output/lroc/lroc_page.html
All the really popular targets have already been assigned.
I picked a favorite crater I like to spy on with my 8″ Dobsonian telescope on the SW dayside.
I bet if the same location is imaged in several angles, someone could disprove any crap like “faces of Mars” features and disprove lightning bugs and zipping ufo lights.
There are piezoelectric lighting effects I have seen there, but no consistent aliens. Alas.
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