Moon questions..

[Venusia]

After a discussion with friends I have some questions...

If we landed on the moon why are there no recent photos of the Landing site/buggy/flag/footprints? With the technology we have now surely someone would want to see a more recent photograph of the site.

Why is it unclear on Google Moon map - no actual photos of that area?

When they did land what were the temperatures they had to endure - at the time did they stay in the dark or light or both?

I have to go back with some answers

thanks guys and gals

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Hi. Here are some nice images of the Apollo landing sites, taken from orbit by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at an altitude of several miles. This one is my favorite:

The shadow clearly shows the shape of the lander, the tracks were left by the lunar rover parked on the right and by the astronauts on foot. With no atmosphere to disturb the dust they will remain visible for a very long time.

The reason NASA hasn't been back is cost and other priorities such as Mars. China landed a rover on the Moon last year, the first soft landing since 1973, but sadly it quickly malfunctioned.

[ronin]

When did google send a high definition satellite to map the moon?

They are using old images of the moon not the latest, say 10 years old and what was released and made available to them.

If you look up the Japanese (I think) images then you will see the lander and the moon rover tracks.

They have been available for a year or two so you are out of date by quite a bit.

I think youcan actually see a moon mobile in some images, you can certainly see the remains of the LEM lander.

So as said they are there and available to look at.

Get some paper and calculate the size of a foot print on the moon.

The flag, well any image is from above, have a look at the edge of a sheet of paper and work out how visible that is at say 100 miles away. Starting to get the idea? Same for the flag pole, say it is 10mm dia, again from above at 100 miles.

Whatever is taking the most recent images is moving, it is not a person on a stationary lump of rock with a tripod collecting data over an extended period of time.

As to temperature difficult, no atmosphere and what we call temperature is the temperature of the atmosphere, so the term is somewhat different. But white is a good reflector of radiation and they wore white suits, with cooling.

[Joe_L]

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html. There are others elsewhere too.

Virtualmoon is a better, more technical map.

If I remember correctly (I watched the alandings live on TV) the landings were carried out during the lunar morning so the sun was up giving good illumination and neither too hot nor too cold. I heard but dont have the details that the lunar surface under those conditions would have been 10-20C as it hadnt had time to fully heat up. The space suit of course would have insulated them from the outside temperatures and had a temperature control sytem. The exterior surface  of the suit would have been heated strongly in the sun on one side and would have cooled on the other side by radiation to outer space and would cool over time to perhaps -150 to -170C eventually, but if the astonaut keeps moving then all areas would get alternate heating and cooling. The same conditions and problems as experienced by modern  astronauts on a spacewalk outside the ISS in earth orbit, or shuttle when that was operating.

Joe

[Rihard]

After a discussion with friends I have some questions...

If we landed on the moon why are there no recent photos of the Landing site/buggy/flag/footprints? With the technology we have now surely someone would want to see a more recent photograph of the site.

Why is it unclear on Google Moon map - no actual photos of that area?

When they did land what were the temperatures they had to endure - at the time did they stay in the dark or light or both?

I have to go back with some answers

thanks guys and gals

Hi Venusia,

Interesting questions.

1) plenty of recent pictures of the landing sites and the hardware that was left there, see these photos from NASA LRO:

http://www.space.com/12796-photos-apollo-moon-landing-sites-lro.html

  Hubble and other Earth telescopes or technologies will not resolve those items, they are way too far and way too small to be seen from here. LRO is orbiting the moon and that's the max it can see from that distance. Rockets (which are basically flying bombs) and other space technologies cost from millions to billions of dollars, no government agency is going to invest that amount of money (and all the involved efforts) just to take a couple of pictures of a place that has been already seen, explored and photographed. It's neither viable nor useful. See also Google Lunar X Prize for private projects that aim at visiting / imaging those sites from close up :-)

Some hardware left on the moon back then is still being used nowadays.

2) Which area or areas of the moon are unclear on Google Maps exactly? Plenty of maps, atlases, pictures and other moon related material throughout the web and not only  :-)

3) Temperatures on the moon Surface swing between + 120 C under sunlight, and -150 in the shadow, but there is no atmosphere that will trap that heat or that will transfer it to you. We have suites that protect us from very hot molten rock spitting out of volcanos (lava) and so we do have suites that can survive direct sunlight in space (astronauts helmets have a golden coating if I'm not wrong). I think astronauts also have  a liquid-based temperature control inside their spacesuit, however I read somewhere they were able to feel the change of temperature when walking on some rocks shadows.

Hope this helps

EDIT: while I slowly wrote my post, someone else posted some of the info before me, sorry for the duplicates folks :-D

[emadmoussa]

Hi. Here are some nice images of the Apollo landing sites, taken from orbit by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at an altitude of several miles. This one is my favorite:

The shadow clearly shows the shape of the lander, the tracks were left by the lunar rover parked on the right and by the astronauts on foot. With no atmosphere to disturb the dust they will remain visible for a very long time.

The reason NASA hasn't been back is cost and other priorities such as Mars. China landed a rover on the Moon last year, the first soft landing since 1973, but sadly it quickly malfunctioned.

Look like slug trails

[daiwelly]

Image taken by Clementine of the Moon’s surface with the Earth rising behind. Note the contrast in colour between the grey lunar surface, where water is difficult to find, and Earth’s abundant blue oceans. (Image courtesy of NASA)

Looking for water from lunar orbit

After a hiatus in lunar exploration of two decades from the last Apollo mission in 1972, in 1994 NASA’s Clementine spacecraft was sent into orbit around the Moon with a mission to map the chemical and mineral composition of the lunar surface.

Using its on-board instruments, a mid-mission decision was made to conduct what was called the Bistatic Radar Experiment. For this experiment, the spacecraft used its radio transmitter to bounce radio waves off the surface of the Moon, bombarding the surface near the north and south lunar poles. The reflected radio waves were picked up by a powerful Deep Space Network (DSN) radio antenna back on Earth.

By looking at the scattering patterns of the radio waves, scientists were able to tell what sort of material the signals were being reflected off. This led them to an exciting conclusion, which was published in 1996; it seemed that the floors of some of the craters near the Moon’s poles were coated in water-ice. Because of the slight tilt of the Moon, there are some deep craters near to the lunar poles that never see sunlight, and so are extremely cold. In fact they are cold enough for any water inside them to remain stable as ice over millions or even billions of years.

[Venusia]

Thank you all. Space travel and conditions does fascinate me so when I had a recent discussion I wanted to fast-track some facts and figures to set the record straight, so thanks to everyone that took the time to answer

[DazC]

Hi. Here are some nice images of the Apollo landing sites, taken from orbit by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at an altitude of several miles. This one is my favorite:

The shadow clearly shows the shape of the lander, the tracks were left by the lunar rover parked on the right and by the astronauts on foot. With no atmosphere to disturb the dust they will remain visible for a very long time.

The reason NASA hasn't been back is cost and other priorities such as Mars. China landed a rover on the Moon last year, the first soft landing since 1973, but sadly it quickly malfunctioned.

Some amazing images here.

Thanks for posting. I'll definitely be showing these to my brother., (he is also interested in the moon landings).

D.C