A Spanish team working in the MIDAS (Moon Impacts Detection and Analysis Software) project at the University of Huelva spotted an exceptionally bright impact on the Moon on Sept. 11, 2013, : Watch the Man in the Moon Get Hit in the Face: Video – Discovery News
Watch the Man in the Moon Get Hit in the Face: Video : Discovery News
Chinese sources now say that Yutu was not dead but just sleeping or pining for the lunar fjords :
China’s moon rover Yutu is awake after its troubled dormancy but experts are still trying to find out the cause of its abnormality, a spokesman with the country’s lunar probe program said on Thursday.
“Yutu has come back to life,” said Pei Zhaoyu, the spokesman.
The mechanical problem with the Chinese lunar rover may be serious, even fatal: China’s Jade Rabbit rover may be victim of moon dust – New Scientist.
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Pretty amazing for one lunar orbiter to capture an image of another one: NASA moon mission captures fleeting view of sister craft – Spaceflight Now.
Here’s the NASA release:
NASA’s LRO Snaps a Picture of NASA’s LADEE Spacecraft
LADEE is in an equatorial orbit (east-to-west) while LRO is in a polar orbit (south-to-north). The two spacecraft are occasionally very close and on Jan. 15, 2014, the two came within 5.6 miles (9 km) of each other. As LROC is a push-broom imager, it builds up an image one line at a time, so catching a target as small and fast as LADEE is tricky. Both spacecraft are orbiting the moon with velocities near 3,600 mph (1,600 meters per second), so timing and pointing of LRO must be nearly perfect to capture LADEE in an LROC image.
LADEE passed directly beneath the LRO orbit plane a few seconds before LRO crossed the LADEE orbit plane, meaning a straight down LROC image would have just missed LADEE. The LADEE and LRO teams worked out the solution: simply have LRO roll 34 degrees to the west so the LROC detector (one line) would be in the right place as LADEE passed beneath.
As planned at 8:11 p.m. EST on Jan. 14, 2014, LADEE entered LRO’s Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) field of view for 1.35 milliseconds and a smeared image of LADEE was snapped. LADEE appears in four lines of the LROC image, and is distorted righttoleft. What can be seen in the LADEE pixels in the NAC image?
Step one is to minimize the geometric distortion in the smeared lines that show the spacecraft. However, in doing so the background lunar landscape becomes distorted and unrecognizable (see above). The scale (dimension) of the NAC pixels recording LADEE is 3.5 inches (9 cm), however, as the spacecraft were both moving about 3,600 mph (1,600 meters per second) the image is blurred in both directions by around 20 inches (50 cm). So the actual pixel scale lies somewhere between 3.5 inches and 20 inches. Despite the blur it is possible to find details of the spacecraft, which is about 4.7 feet (1.9 meters) wide and 7.7 feet (2.4 meters) long. The engine nozzle, bright solar panel and perhaps a star tracker camera can be seen (especially if you have a correctly oriented schematic diagram of LADEE for comparison).
LADEE was launched Sept. 6, 2013. LADEE is gathering detailed information about the structure and composition of the thin lunar atmosphere and determining whether dust is being lofted into the lunar sky.
LRO launched Sept. 18, 2009. LRO continues to bring the world astounding views of the lunar surface and a treasure trove of lunar data.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the LRO mission. NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., manages the LADEE mission.
Related Links
› NASA’s LRO website
› NASA’s LADEE website
› More on this story at ASU’s LROC website
Speaking of the Moon, there are indications that there could be minute but non-zero amounts of water in lunar dust created by solar wind protons smacking into mineral molecules and freeing oxygen, which would in turn combine with the protons (i.e. hydrogen) : Space Dust Possible Source Of Water On Moon And Maybe Even Life On Other Planets – IBTimes.com –
Researchers from the University of Hawaii, Manoa, the University of California, Berkeley, and California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used state-of-the-art electron microscopes to get a close-up look at particles of interplanetary space dust. What they found was that solar wind radiation had changed the outer rims on the silicate minerals in space dust to water, something scientists previously believed to be the case but weren’t able to prove because of limited technology.
Their study, published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that the water found on interplanetary dust forms from the reaction of solar wind and oxygen in the silicate mineral grains. Solar wind, which bombards the particles with ionized hydrogen atoms, reorganized the atoms in the dust particles, leaving oxygen more available to react with hydrogen to create water. Researchers say the implications of finding water on the rims of space dust are huge.
A panoramic image of the lunar surface taken by the Chang’e 3 lander has been released on the China News website. Chang’e 3 Panorama – China News
Here is the Google translation of the caption:
January 17, China’s National Defense Science and Technology Industrial Development Bureau released image map Chang E III lunar lander photographed. Pictured December 17, 2013 to 18, Chang E on the 3rd lander terrain surrounding the lander camera range of 360 ° panorama mosaic image map, using a cylindrical projection expression. China news
They provide slices at greater resolution. For example, this slice shows the Yutu rover:
Update: There is also a new time-lapse panorama : China’s Yutu rover trundles across the Moon in Time-lapse Panorama – Universe Today.
