LCROSS and LRO Lunar missions news

[Rick]

The Moon has the coldest place in the Solar System measured by a spacecraft.

Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has used its Diviner instrument to probe the insides of permanently shadowed craters on Earth's satellite.

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8416749.stm

[mickw]

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) took the picture, which was released along with a flood of other data from the spacecraft last week. The photo is actually a mosaic of thousands of different lunar farside images taken by the lunar orbiter's Wide Angle Camera.

The new picture provides the most complete look at the history and composition of the moon's farside to date, and should serve as a valuable resource for the scientific community, researchers said

Dark Side

[PhilB]

Impressive, somewhat different to that sent back by the first Russian probes, which, in their day, were also ground breaking science.

[Rick]

New Evidence For Young Lunar Volcanism!

Many young volcanic deposits were recently identified in LROC NAC images. Their sharp nature and general lack of superposed impact craters greater than 20 meters in diameter indicate these deposits probably formed in the last 100 million years, perhaps even more recently than 50 million years ago. An amazing result!

A new paper, published in Nature Geoscience, presents 70 topographic anomalies, informally called Irregular Mare Patches, or IMPs, most of these occurrences were previously undocumented. The IMPs are thought to be remnants of small basaltic eruptions that formed significantly after the commonly accepted end of lunar volcanism (1 to 1.5 billion years ago).

More: http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/818

[Rick]

NASA's LRO Spacecraft Finds March 17, 2013 Impact Crater and More

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) acquired images of the lunar surface before and after the largest recorded explosion occurred on the surface.

On March 17, 2013, an object the size of a small boulder hit the surface in Mare Imbrium and exploded in a flash of light nearly 10 times as bright as anything ever recorded before.

This bright flash was recorded by researchers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville with coordinates 20.6°N, 336.1°E. The Lunar Reconnaissance Camera (LROC) scientists were able to obtain observations before and after the impact. Comparing the actual size of the crater to the brightness of the flash helps validate impact models.

More from NASA

[Rick]

NASA's LRO Discovers Earth's Pull is 'Massaging' our Moon

In August, 2010, researchers using images from LRO's Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) reported the discovery of 14 cliffs known as "lobate scarps" on the moon's surface, in addition to about 70 previously known from the limited high-resolution Apollo Panoramic Camera photographs. Due largely to their random distribution across the surface, the science team concluded that the moon is shrinking.

These small faults are typically less than 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) long and only tens of yards or meters high. They are most likely formed by global contraction resulting from cooling of the moon's still hot interior. As the interior cools and portions of the liquid outer core solidify, the volume decreases; thus the moon shrinks and the solid crust buckles.

Now, after more than six years in orbit, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) has imaged nearly three-fourths of the lunar surface at high resolution, allowing the discovery of over 3,000 more of these features. These globally distributed faults have emerged as the most common tectonic landform on the moon. An analysis of the orientations of these small scarps yielded a surprising result: the faults created as the moon shrinks are being influenced by an unexpected source—gravitational tidal forces from Earth.

More from NASA