![]() The film had to be moved precisely first from the storage spool to the lens, then to a holding area as the remaining photographs were taken, and finally to the development stage, where a layer of chemical-infused gelatin was pressed up against the film. Instead, the Lunar Orbiters used the Kodak BIMAT transfer processing system, which was classified by the Central Intelligence Agency until 2001 because it was primarily created for reconnaissance. “So, they had to devise a system where you develop the film on board the spacecraft.” The floating photo labĭeveloping film usually requires rinsing the negatives in a series of liquid chemicals, which would wreak havoc inside of a satellite in microgravity. “Once you’re at the moon, you could take all the pictures all you want, but you have no way of getting the film back to Earth to develop it,” Williams says. ![]() But using film in space came with a major hurdle. Unauthorized use is prohibited.įrom as close as a few hundred miles above the moon’s surface, the Lunar Orbiters captured features down to about three feet wide. Rather than standard 35-millimeter film, the satellites used 70-millimeter, the same size that’s used today to make IMAX movies. Department of Defense was using similar cameras in the CORONA program, known to the public as Discoverer, to take satellite photos of the Soviet Union.Įach Lunar Orbiter had two cameras, one with a high-resolution lens and one with medium resolution. “They basically borrowed spy cameras from the Defense Department, from their satellite program,” says David Williams, the acting head of the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive. The Lunar Orbiters weren’t the first photo-focused spacecraft aimed at the moon, but they were unique because of the equipment they were carrying. But with precise engineering-and some top-secret reconnaissance technology-the Lunar Orbiters provided NASA engineers and scientists the imagery they needed to make the Apollo landings possible. In the pre-digital era, sending photographs from space back to Earth was no casual task. The Lunar Orbiters also returned images of the far side of the moon, such as this picture taken by Lunar Orbiter 3 in 1967. In September 2010, the probe wrapped this mission up and shifted into more of a pure science mode to help scientists better understand Earth's nearest neighbor.Įven before the latest data release, LRO had delivered in a big way, helping researchers generate the most detailed map of the lunar surface ever made.įollow for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter and on Facebook. LRO is about the size of a Mini Cooper car, and it's equipped with seven instruments to observe the moon. The spacecraft circles the moon in a polar orbit, at an altitude of about 31 miles (50 kilometers).įor the first year of its operational life, LRO spent most of its time scouting the moon to help NASA plan for future lunar exploration missions. LCROSS crashed into a shadowed crater at the moon's south pole in October 2009 in a hunt for water ice, which it found. NASA launched the $504 million LRO spacecraft in June 2009 along with a piggyback probe called LCROSS. "The LROC map products being released over the next week will not only serve the lunar science community for years to come, but also provide a roadmap for human exploration of our nearest neighbor," LROC principal investigator Mark Robinson, of Arizona State University, said in a statement. Also released werehigher resolution maps of selected parts of the moon, which were stitched together from observations taken by LROC's two Narrow Angle Cameras, researchers said.Īnd there are more moon maps and mosaics yet to come. When taken altogether, LRO's seven science instruments delivered more than 192 terabytes of data in the new release - enough to fill about 41,000 DVDs, NASA officials said.Īmong the new LROC data products is a global lunar map with a resolution of 100 meters per pixel. The LROC observations are just one small part of a huge mound of orbiter data released on March 14. The new image was built using data from LRO's Wide Angle Camera, one of the three imaging tools on the spacecraft's main Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). But basaltic volcanism was much more limited on the far side, and as a result the region sports just a few isolated maria, researchers said. Widespread basaltic plains called "maria," deposited by volcanic activity long ago, cover much of the near side. Since then, scientists have learned that the far side of the moon is a very different place than the near side.
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