Apollo Landing Sites, with Shadows
- Visualizations by:
- Ernie Wright
- View full credits
LROC, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, will have a number of opportunities to photograph the Apollo landing sites. Despite the excellent half-meter resolution of LROC's narrow angle cameras, the LM descent stage at each site can fill only a few pixels of these images. If photographed when the Sun is low in the lunar sky, however, the long shadow formed by the descent stage is easily discernable.
This brief animation shows the locations of the Apollo landing sites, with lengthening shadows as each site approaches lunar nightfall. The lighting simulates the angle of the Sun during the second week of July, 2009, when LROC took its first images of the sites. The gold LM markers are about 20,000 times actual size.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Animators
- Ernie Wright (USRA) [Lead]
- Marte Newcombe (GST)
Scientists
- Mark Robinson (Arizona State University)
- Richard Vondrak (NASA/GSFC)
Producer
- Andrew Freeberg (NASA/GSFC)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Datasets used in this visualization
Clementine
KAGUYA DEM (Collected with the Laser Altimeter (LALT) sensor)
Formerly known as "SELENE".
See more visualizations using this data setULCN 2005 (A.K.A. Unified Lunar Control Network 2005)
The ULCN 2005 (Unified Lunar Control Network 2005) is a lunar control point network that precisely measured 272,931 pieces of data produced by the USGS using existing lunar imagery or data from the Clementine and other observations.
See more visualizations using this data setNote: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.