Map Of Moon

New NASA moon map shows lunar body in marvelous detail (VIDEO)

Colonizing the moon just got a little bit easier. Now, were we to establish a society on the lunar body, we could consult a decent map on how to get our moonbuggies to the planetoidal McDonald’s to pick up some Moonshakes and Moon McMuffins.

The old map, the 2005 Unified Lunar Control Network model , was comparatively blurry and imprecise. It was patched together from thousands of images taken by the Clementine spacecraft, launched in 1994, as well as data from other probes and observations made from earth. It was as good as could be hoped for at the time and would get an intrepid explorer from point A to point B, eventually. But NASA has a new toy to play with, the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter , and it is taking apart the moon’s veil of secrecy layer by layer with amazing results. (Miss the recent full eclipse of the moon? Watch it here. )

Witness the differences in the 2005 map and this Rand-McNally-worthy slice of cartography produced by the laser altimeter. Blue and green areas represent low altitudes and red shows where the moon mountains are:

The LOLA instrument is mounted on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a device that is preparing the way for Americans to revisit the moon. The craft is doing important work like scouting out safe and “compelling” landing sites and searching for water, as well as monitoring the effects of long-term exposure to the radiation that constantly fizzes through space.

Interestingly enough, on board is also a hardened container containing a microchip with the names of more than 1 million earth citizens – the results of a NASA contest to "Send Your Name to the Moon." You can read more about LRO's mission at its dedicated website .

NASA shows a new map of the dark side of the Moon | Science ...

NASA showed on Monday the most complete picture of the far side of the moon. The picture was made thanks to the data transmitted by the probe Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

The view of the moon has been changed forever. The seven LRO probe’s instruments collected 192 terabytes of data, images and maps, which have set the most accurate picture to date of Earth’s natural satellite.

“This is a great achievement”, Douglas Cooke said, Associate Administrator for the Office of Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, at NASA.

The LRO spacecraft was launched into space in June 2009. Since it began to send us its first images, LRO has allowed us to know better the far side of the moon and design a complete map of its craters. “And that was only the beginning”, Cooke said.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is a NASA robotic spacecraft currently orbiting the Moon on a low 50 km polar mapping orbit.

The LRO mission is a precursor to future manned missions to the Moon by NASA. To this end a detailed mapping program will identify safe landing sites, locate potential resources on the Moon, characterize the radiation environment, and demonstrate new technology.

The Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter ( LOLA ) has conducted more than 4,000 million measurements , a hundred times more than all the data sent so far by all the artifacts used by NASA to investigate the Moon. The new data open a world of possibilites for the future of exploration and science. NASA says the amount of information is equal to about 41,000 DVD.

Another of his instruments is the Chamber of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LROC) which revealed detailed images of almost 5.7 million square kilometers of the Moon surface during the exploration phase.

“With this resolution, LRO could easily spot a picnic table on the moon,” said LRO’s Project Scientist Richard Vondrak of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

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