NASA has reported that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has sent back its first images of Apollo lunar landing sites. They say they will be releasing the images at 12 noon EDT (5pm London Time), today, Friday 17th July. Here is a link to the press release.

Update: The photos have been released at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html – Not the clearest, but once the satellite gets to it’s final orbit, we should expect images of the resolution I wrote about below.

The actual photos will probably be released at http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_browse.

Now, for the bad news… Although the orbiter has a high resolution camera, reportedly able to do one pixel per sqare foot (0.3m resolution), this is at perigee (the closest point of orbit) and at nadir (directly overhead). So far, the best images released are half of that (one quarter of the resolution) at one pixel per 0.56m.

I decided to work out what to expect to see.

The lunar lander module has a maximum diameter of 9.07m. At 56cm per pixel, this makes the lander 16 pixels in diameter… or like this:

Now, let’s overlay it on the moon, with a shadow:

Image sources are:
http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/mwade/project/apollo.htm
http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_browse/view/iom20090703

I hope you weren’t expecting more than this…

At some of the Apollo sites, there will be tracks from the lunar rover. The rover is 72 inches wide, which is 1.82 metres, or 2.8 pixels, but the actual wheel tracks will likely be under half a pixel wide so possibly detectable by their shadows.

The foot prints will come in at around 0.5 x 0.25 pixels, hardly detectable.

We should be able to see the actual rovers at 3×4 pixels, and the PLSS (Life support back packs), provided they are lying flat at around 1×2 pixels, but bright white.

Although these images will be of great interest to us Apollo fans, the people who believe it was hoaxed won’t change their minds.

For those of you that use twitter, I’m going to be tweeting the Moon Landing Live (Well, 40 years late).

You can find the twitter feed at www.twitter.com/ApolloEcho.
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Article reads:
St Petersburg Independent – Friday, July 4 1969
[image] Credit: AP

Moon Shot
This double exposure of the moon and the Apollo 11 moon rocket was made after the service gantry was moved away during a countdown demonstration test. The rocket is scheduled to be launched from Cape Kennedy July 16, with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edward E. Aldrin Jr. in an attempt for a lunar landing and walk on the surface.

Join me on twitter at www.twitter.com/ApolloEcho to relive the 40th Anniversary of the moon landing, 40 years late!

The Age – 5th July 1969
America’s Apollo 11 astronauts will bring back to Earth double the quantity of Moon specimens than was earlier planned, scientists announced in Houston today.

Join me on twitter at www.twitter.com/ApolloEcho to relive the 40th Anniversary of the moon landing, 40 years late!

Space shuttle Discovery is about 3 hours away from their de-orbit burn for an expected landing of (17:39 UTC).

NASA are about to start their go/no-go poll to close the payload bay doors.
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While the shuttle is on it’s way to the station, more debris is inbound.

NASA are deciding what to do. They may boost the station up a bit which will mean that the shuttle will get there a day later.

This piece of debris is to pass far closer than last week. Only half a mile this time.

I’m trying to find out exactly which piece is involved and will update this once more information is available.

This post is part of a series on understanding the meaning behind the values contained in a Two Line Element set, or Keplerian Elements. The main article is here.

First Time Derivative of the Mean Motion

Engineers like to use long confusing names for some of these fields. This field is sometimes called the “Ballistic Coefficient”.
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This post is part of a series on understanding the meaning behind the values contained in a Two Line Element set, or Keplerian Elements. The main article is here.

Epoch Year and Day

The epoch is simply the point in time that the two line element set is valid for.
The position of the satellite is supplied as part of the two line element set – The position for a particular point in time can then be calculated from the difference between the Epoch and the time you want to know.
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Space Shuttle discovery is still on track for a launch at 11:43pm UTC. Weather is perfect and everything looks good.

There is a sleeping bat attached to the external fuel tank however “The bat is not expected to interfere with launch this evening.”.

A live video feed is available here..

After fixing a problem with leaking fuel, Space Shuttle Discovery is still go for Launch on Sunday the 15th March.

Launch time is expected to be 23:43 UTC (Which is 19:43 EDT, or 12:43 Monday NZDT).

More information is available from http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/.

Live video is available from http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/