As you gaze up at the Christmas Moon, take note that NASA has a spacecraft currently orbiting Earth’s only natural satellite. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission has been investigating the Moon’s surface since 2009.
LRO has collected a treasure trove of data with its seven powerful instruments, making an invaluable contribution to our knowledge about the Moon.
The Moon’s Orientale basin is an archetype of “multi-ring” basins found throughout the solar system. New research has enabled scientists to reconstruct Orientale’s formation using data from NASA’s GRAIL mission. It is now thought that the 580-mile-wide feature was created 3.8 billion years ago by an impacting object some 40 miles across travelling at about 9 miles per second.
The total solar eclipse of Wednesday, 9 March 2016 is of relatively long duration — 4m 9s at greatest eclipse — which occurs at 1:57 UT. Totality is visible from Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi and the North Pacific Ocean, while the partial phases can be seen from East Asia, Australia and the Pacific Ocean. See the event unfold in these new NASA timelapse visualisations.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recently captured a unique view of Earth centred just off the coast of Liberia from the spacecraft’s vantage point in orbit around the Moon, about 83 miles above the crater Compton, which is located just beyond the eastern limb of the Moon, on the lunar farside.
© 2019 Pole Star Publications Limited