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Moon NASA

NASA Spacecraft Images Crash Site of Retired LADEE Probe 26

Posted by timothy from the she-went-down-in-the-dark dept.
An anonymous reader writes In April, NASA ended the mission of its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission by de-orbiting (read: crashing) it on the far side of the moon. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has now directly imaged the crash site, showing a small crater and the spray of rocks and dust caused by the crash. "LADEE's grave lies about 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers) from the eastern rim of the larger Sundman V crater, just 0.2 miles (0.3 km) north of the spot where mission team members predicted the spacecraft would go down based on tracking data, NASA officials said. ... The new crater is less than 10 feet (3 meters) wide. It's so small because LADEE was just the size of a washing machine, and the probe was traveling relatively slowly (3,800 mph, or 6,116 km/h) when it impacted the surface. The LROC team was able to spot LADEE's impact crater after developing a new tool that compared before-and-after images of the same lunar sites, researchers said."
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NASA Spacecraft Images Crash Site of Retired LADEE Probe More

NASA Spacecraft Images Crash Site of Retired LADEE Probe

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  • So a washing machine going 3,00 MPH would make a decent hole in the dirt. Like anvil shooting
  • enlarging my vocab one crash at a time.

  • Can someone explain to me why the images have such bad quality and resolution? Satellite images of the earth are good enough to spot someone sunbathing on a roof. I would think that the price of top-notch optics and sensors would pale compared to the cost of just making the trip to the moon, so why aren't the pictures as good quality as what we get from the earth-orbiting satellites?

    • Can someone explain to me why the images have such bad quality and resolution? Satellite images of the earth are good enough to spot someone sunbathing on a roof.

      The narrow band cameras have a resolution of 0.5 meters/pixel
      That also happens to be the legal limit for commercially available satellite imagery.

      They could have sent up something to take higher resolution pictures, but they wouldn't have the memory, weight, or power budget to handle the files.

      There's also the fact that (A) the system they're using is proven technology that was modified from the Mars orbiter camera and (B) 0.5 meters/pixel is a fairly high resolution for mapping a landscape.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by itzly ( 3699663 )
      The satellite images of people sunbathing on their roof are actually taken with an airplane.
    • Because then you could spot the random alien ship parts that the grays also crashed there duh :)

  • I didn't know Rick Deckard was currently working as a NASA spokesman.

  • I can't read a story about this probe without hearing Jerry Lewis screaming in my head.

  • I find it a little sort sighted we are just dumping our trash about. Here me out before you say, "well it is just one advanced probe." They used to say that about satellites.

    More than 95% of stuff in orbit now is junk and huge resources at NASA and DoD are used just to track it More than 500,000 pieces of debris, or “space junk,” are tracked as they orbit the Earth. They all travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by itzly ( 3699663 )
      Space junk in Earth orbit is completely incomparable to a crashed satellite on the Moon's surface.

      • Space junk in Earth orbit is completely incomparable to a crashed satellite on the Moon's surface.

        Space junk in Earth orbit is completely comparable to a crashed satellite on the Moon's surface. I can do that too.

    • Your argument/analogy is for crashing it into the moon, rather than leaving it as orbit of the moon as space junk.

      • Your argument/analogy is for crashing it into the moon, rather than leaving it as orbit of the moon as space junk.

        Not really. You could land it in a desert and collect it or put it on a course with the sun, burning it up into it's base elements

        • No you can't.

          One of those options would require ludicrous amounts of delta-V, and the other would require large amounts of delta-V. The resulting increase in mass making for even more delta-V requirements to get it to where it was originally. And more mass to launch and so on.

          It's not magic. They can't just click their fingers and have a magic rocket and fuel appear attacked the space craft in lunar orbit.

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