Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Best radar images of lunar south pole revealed

They were obtained with the Goldstone radar in the 2nd half of 2006 when the geometry was particularly favorable and the Moon showed the Earth about as much of its rugged south polar region as possible. Now NASA has presented the results at news conference in Denver (in which this blogger participated via phone): the 3D images with 30 to 40 meters resolution are by far the best of this particular region of the Moon which is considered for future unmanned and even manned missions. Within a small area the topography varies by 12 km while on the whole Earth that variation is only 9 km.

In other news Venus & Mercury are in conjunction in the morning sky - and 17 numbers have been assigned to larger debris particles from the destroyed satellite: One observation by an amateur could indeed be one of these.

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