Archive August 2009
LROC Image Of The Apollo 14 Landing Site
LROC NAC image
of the Apollo 14 landing site
and nearby Cone crater.
This picture is a slightly enhanced crop from the original LROC NAC image of the Fra Mauro highlands and shows the Apollo 14 landing site and nearby Cone crater. The faint trails left by the astronauts’ footprints can be clearly seen.
Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University/astroarts.org
Panorama of Saddle Rock
This panorama, stitched from the Hasselblad photographs AS14-68-9449/50/51 taken by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell, shows Saddle Rock, the largest boulder seen during the second extravehicular activity (EVA) of the Apollo 14 mission. Named for its shape, Saddle Rock is 4.5 meters across.
Image Credit: NASA/Panorama by astroarts.org
Identifying Saddle Rock in the LROC NAC image
of the Apollo 14 landing site.
This picture combines a crop (scaled by a factor of 233 %) from the LROC NAC image of the Apollo 14 landing site with the panorama of Saddle Rock shown above. The arrow points to the location of Saddle Rock at the Apollo 14 geology station C1 near the rim of Cone crater.
Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University/astroarts.org
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First close-up image of the Galilean moon Europa
This black and white image of Europa,
the smallest of Jupiter's four Galilean satellites,
was acquired by Voyager 2 on July 9, 1979.
On July 9, 2009, was the thirtieth anniversary of the flyby of the Voyager 2 probe past Jupiter.
The picture shown here, taken by Voyager 2 from a distance of 246,000 kilometers, was the first close look ever obtained of Jupiter’s satellite, Europa.
The linear crack-like features had been seen from a much greater distance by Voyager 1, but this image provides a resolution of about four kilometers. The complicated linear features appear even more like cracks or huge fractures in this image. Also seen are somewhat darker mottled regions which appear to have a slightly pitted appearance, due to small scale craters.
No large craters (more than five kilometers in diameter) are easily identifiable in the Europa photographs to date, suggesting that this satellite has a young surface.
Various models for Europa’s structure were tested during analysis of this image, including the possibility that the surface is a thin ice crust overlying water or softer ice and that the fracture systems seen are breaks in that crust. Resurfacing mechanisms such as production of fresh ice or snow along the cracks and cold glacier-like flows were considered as possibilities for removing evidence of impact events.
Photo-ID: JPL P-21758; Raw Image Name: A79-7087; Date: July 9, 1979.
The image here is a scan from a print of the original data, so some image quality is lost.
Image Credit: NASA Ames Research Center/astroarts.org
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