Friday, February 6, 2009

Moonviews: Orbiter Image Recovery Update

It has been really amazing to watch as the still-very-useful Lunar Orbiter photograph catalog is painstakingly restored before our eyes. Moonviews and the United States Geological Service Map-A-Planet project online are still the place to go to pull out volumes of coordinated and coded comparisons of the surface of the Moon. While Kaguya and Chandrayaan are manifestly dazzling, much of their deeper data is far from available to the general public.

The Lunar Orbiter project, coincident to the Surveyor project, (1966-1968), has become like a mission redone, and when combined with the remote sensing data from Clementine (1994) are constantly discovering new and interesting things about the features of the Moon's Near Side, for example, that Humans have been sketching out for five centuries.

(The Lunar and Planetary Science Institute's 40th annual conference, next month, should be quite a doozy!)

For a progress report on the LO Photo Recover process, visit Moonviews.com

For a trip to the Moon, with new eyes, bookmark Map-A-Planet.

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