NASA Reveals New Images of Apollo Landing Sites 269
sighted writes "Sharp new images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 landing sites in amazing detail, including the last foot trails left by astronauts on the lunar surface."
These pictures were grabbed after the LRO dropped its orbit from 50km above the surface to 25km.
Re:Poor NASA server (Score:4, Interesting)
Eh, it's only 1MB (which is actually quite large considering uncompressed would be 1.8MB by my estimate). Given how carelessly pages are designed these days, you're probably saving 100+ requests and 1MB of data by them not linking the page...
But hey, you don't have to listen to me; check out http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/ [websiteoptimization.com]
Total HTTP Requests: 312
Total Size: 1828125 bytes
Woohoo! Slashdot is doing them a favor.
Letter of Marque and Reprisal (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No stars in the photo! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Except roving around for kilometers on Mars.
But yeah, other than Mars Rovers... oh, and orbiting Saturn.
Yeah, but other than Mars rovers and orbiting Saturn... oh, and orbiting Mercury. And ongoing missions to interstellar space. And a mission to Pluto. And orbiting an asteroid. And private space travel. And starting work on manned trips to asteroids...
But yeah, other than that, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Re:No stars in the photo! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, then I think it's been 40 years and we've achieved precious little else...
Correction: Since then, we've done a lot of important and useful work instead of wasting time on spectacular Cold War PR missions.
NASA has achieved a lot more every year since then than they did on the Apollo missions. Sorry if it wasn't sexy enough for you, but the real work rarely is...
How poignant and sad... (Score:5, Interesting)
...that we can see so clearly where we've been, but can't go there again.
Of all the things ever predicted by science-fiction writers, did any of them predict that after we'd gotten to the moon, we'd let grass grow on the Saturn launching pads?
"History records that the first successful voyage to the Moon was made in 2316 by Grzchopeng M'bennypacker. Some enthusiasts insist that unidentifiable metal fragments in the Taurus-Littrow valley are human artifacts, and are evidence that the United States reached the moon centuries earlier, but professional historians dismiss these as unproven speculation, and do not accept Frafnar Otsumix's alleged "decoding" of binary files alleged to be in what Otsumix calls "jpg" format. In any case, even if a handful of crude United States spacecraft somehow--by design or accident--managed reach the moon in the twentieth century, it is of no importance as nothing further came of it."