Desolate magnificence -The Space Review

LRO images on display at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum [Dwayne Day/The Space Review].

Dwayne Day

The Space Review

Right now Washington, DC’s museums are filled with the noise of hormonal teenagers on their spring break trips to the nation’s capital. They run around aimlessly, oblivious to their surroundings, or sprawl on the dirty carpet absorbed in their own little worlds. Later, in May, the senior class trips will show up, and those older students are a little less noisy, a little more focused, but they too will probably not be all that interested in the actual museums, even if they take their noses out of their cellphones for more than a second or two. But just maybe, perhaps, one or two of them may accidentally wander into one of the National Air and Space Museum’s new exhibits and they might quiet down for a moment and see something both familiar and alien.

The exhibit is titled “A New Moon Rises” and it is a display of large format photographs from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter featuring the Moon in all its panchromatic glory. You could look at most of these photos on your computer screen, but seeing them enlarged and displayed on a museum wall like works of art is an entirely different experience.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, was launched in 2009 and has been chugging away ever since. If nothing breaks, in four or five years the spacecraft will probably run out of fuel and, because the Moon’s gravity field is uneven, it will ultimately fall and silently crash into the surface after more than a decade in orbit.

- Read the full article online, in the latest issue of The Space Review, HERE.

LRO: widespread evidence of young lunar volcanism

The feature called Maskelyne is one of many newly discovered young volcanic deposits on the Moon. Called irregular mare patches, these areas are thought to be remnants of small basaltic eruptions that occurred much later than the commonly accepted end of lunar volcanism, 1 to 1.5 billion years ago [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Dwayne Brown

NASA HQ

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has provided researchers strong evidence the moon’s volcanic activity slowed gradually instead of stopping abruptly a billion years ago.

Scores of distinctive rock deposits observed by LRO are estimated to be less than 100 million years old. This time period corresponds to Earth’s Cretaceous period, the heyday of dinosaurs. Some areas may be less than 50 million years old. Details of the study are published online in Sunday’s edition of Nature Geoscience.

“This finding is the kind of science that is literally going to make geologists rewrite the textbooks about the moon,” said John Keller, LRO project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The deposits are scattered across the moon’s dark volcanic plains and are characterized by a mixture of smooth, rounded, shallow mounds next to patches of rough, blocky terrain. Because of this combination of textures, the researchers refer to these unusual areas as irregular mare patches.

The features are too small to be seen from Earth, averaging less than a third of a mile (500 meters) across in their largest dimension. One of the largest, a well-studied area called Ina, was imaged from lunar orbit by Apollo 15 astronauts.

Ina appeared to be a one-of-a-kind feature until researchers from Arizona State University in Tempe and Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in Germany spotted many similar regions in high-resolution images taken by the two Narrow Angle Cameras that are part of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC. The team identified a total of 70 irregular mare patches on the near side of the moon.

The large number of these features and their wide distribution strongly suggest that late-stage volcanic activity was not an anomaly but an important part of the moon's geologic history.

The numbers and sizes of the craters within these areas indicate the deposits are relatively recent. Based on a technique that links such crater measurements to the ages of Apollo and Luna samples, three of the irregular mare patches are thought to be less than 100 million years old, and perhaps less than 50 million years old in the case of Ina. The steep slopes leading down from the smooth rock layers to the rough terrain are consistent with the young age estimates.

In contrast, the volcanic plains surrounding these distinctive regions are attributed to volcanic activity that started about 3 1/2 billion years ago and ended roughly 1 billion years ago. At that point, all volcanic activity on the moon was thought to cease.

Several earlier studies suggested that Ina was quite young and might have formed due to localized volcanic activity. However, in the absence of other similar features, Ina was not considered an indication of widespread volcanism.

The findings have major implications for how warm the moon’s interior is thought to be.

An oblique, novel view of the Ina formation (3 km across, 18.65°N, 5.3°E) from the LROC narrow angle camera (resolution 2.5 meters per pixel [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

“The existence and age of the irregular mare patches tell us that the lunar mantle had to remain hot enough to provide magma for the small-volume eruptions that created these unusual young features,” said Sarah Braden, a recent Arizona State University graduate and the lead author of the study.

The new information is hard to reconcile with what currently is thought about the temperature of the interior of the moon.

“These young volcanic features are prime targets for future exploration, both robotic and human,” said Mark Robinson, LROC principal investigator at Arizona State University.

LRO is managed by Goddard for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. LROC, a system of three cameras, was designed and built by Malin Space Science Systems and is operated by Arizona State University.

To access the complete collection of LROC images, visit http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/

For more information about LRO, visit http://www.nasa.gov/lro

Some Related Posts:
Hansteen α -   January 15, 2014
Small-scale volcanism on the lunar mare, July 13, 2013
Unassuming volcanic vent north of Aristarchus Plateau, April 1, 2013
New views of the hollows of Rimae Sosigenes, March 28, 2013
Inside Rima Hyginus, June 12, 2012
Ina of the Meniscus Hollows, March 21, 2012
LUNAR MENISCUS HOLLOWS. P. J. Stooke, Department of Geography and Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; 43rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (2012), #1011.
Whale of a Hollow, March 20, 2012
It's a gas, man, Paul Spudis, Smithsonian Air & Space, October 6, 2011

It's not bragging if you do it

Climbing high over the central Pacific, a forward camera on the Long March 3B third stage captured the deployment of Chang'e-3 on its 112 hour "Journey to the Moon." Launched after midnight in China, the modified Long March 3B completes its part of the mission minutes later over the International Dateline; confronting sunrise of the previous day. Chang'e-3 and Yutu, its "Jade Rabbit" lunar rover, speed on to intercept a New Moon, into the glare of the Sun [CCTV].

Dwayne Day
The Space Review

Later this week, if all goes according to plan, China will land a robotic spacecraft and rover on the Moon, something that nobody has done in nearly four decades. If the Chinese do what they did for the launch, they will broadcast much of the event live on television and over the Internet. Last week’s launch coverage on government-controlled English language CCTV was remarkable for its openness. Indeed, the coverage was indistinguishable from Western news coverage of a major space event. There was no propagandizing or nationalistic chest-thumping, just a straightforward reporting with lots of information about the mission and what was happening. The event, and its coverage, highlighted the fact that China has an attractive, technically sophisticated scientific space program that could serve international relations purposes. It was a demonstration of what American political scientist Joseph Nye has referred to as “soft power,” the ability to compel or attract nations to do what you want. China’s space program gives them this ability to attract partners. The problem is that some of China’s other activities undercut their attractiveness as a potential partner.

Last Sunday’s CCTV coverage of the Chang’e-3 launch was quite sophisticated. The network had correspondents at the launch site and at the control center. They had a commentator in the studio asking rudimentary questions of an expert during the launch sequence. The questions and the expert’s answers were intended for a general, non-space-savvy audience. They also had animations of the lander and rover, and segments focusing on the development of the spacecraft, including interviews with engineers who had built individual parts. For instance, one young engineer had worked on small electric motors for the spacecraft. He acknowledged that there was nothing very sophisticated or exciting about the motors, but that they were vital to mission success.

Read the full article, HERE.

Red Moon, Blue Moon

The International Lunar Network (ILN) would feature a series of landers built by NASA and other nations to perform seismic surveys of the lunar interior [NASA].

Dwayne Day
The Space Review

Yesterday China launched Chang’e-3 on its way to the Moon, with landing scheduled for December 14. If it succeeds, it will be the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon in nearly four decades. Although the lander and rover have a modest scientific instrument suite, they are headed for a previously unexplored region of the Moon and will therefore return new and undoubtedly interesting data.

Chang’e-3 will not be alone. NASA currently has two spacecraft—Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and LADEE—circling the Moon. But although NASA also has several other possible lunar lander missions that it could start building within the next decade, it is unlikely that a NASA spacecraft will join the Chinese on the lunar surface for many years to come.

Read the full article, HERE.

A Russian Moon?

Another design for renewing Russia's groundbreaking program of robotic lunar exploration is set aside. Above is a 2008 notional concept of the Roscosmos Luna-Glob orbiter, equipped with penetrators and supporting both a lander and an ISRO-built rover, part of a highly anticipated international mission recently abandoned. Under the Soviet regime Russia pioneered and brought to an end exploration of the Moon's surface [IKI/Lavochkin].

Dwayne Day

The Space Review

Earlier this month the Russian government announced that it plans to launch a lunar orbiter in 2015, followed by a lander a year later, both of them designated Luna-Glob. This is the latest version of what has been a rather convoluted series of Russian announcements about their planetary exploration plans, particularly with regards to the Moon. Previous plans had involved launching the orbiter and lander together, then changed to launch the lander a year before the orbiter. Now the Russians have switched the order. This is a more logical plan than previous ones, and at least to outsiders it appears as if the Russians are starting to develop a more sensible sequence of planetary science missions, as well as mission goals, than they have in the past. It’s something we should hope for, as the Russians could possibly by the most active nation conducting lunar exploration in the next decade.

Although they have experience with landing robotic craft on the Moon, launching a Moon orbiter before a lander is a better approach for the Russians because they need to re-learn how to walk before they can start to run. In late 2011 they suffered an embarrassing failure of their overly-ambitious Fobos-Grunt mission. The spacecraft fell silent almost immediately after launch, circled the Earth for a few weeks, and finally reentered. Many independent observers had predicted that Fobos-Grunt would fail because it was too complicated for a space program that had not built a planetary spacecraft in over a decade and a half (see “Red moon around a red planet,” The Space Review, November 7, 2011). The only real surprise was that the spacecraft failed so early, probably a sign that Russian quality control and systems engineering are both in bad shape, something that has been reinforced by a series of launch vehicle problems. Russian planetary science plans in recent years appeared to experience the “Christmas Tree” problem that American robotic spacecraft suffered from in the 1980s. This is where a mission gets more and more complex as scientists add more instruments, increasing the cost and the risk that something will go wrong. Fobos-Grunt had this problem in spades and some Russian lunar missions appeared to be succumbing to it as well. A single mission including an orbiter, lander, and rover, some of them from different countries, is very hard to integrate, but until recently such a mission was in Russian lunar plans.

Read the full article at The Space Review, HERE.