Japan launches first lunar probe

Oh NO! The United States moon bases and Alien bases alike will be Discovered and outed to the entire world!


Sorry, i had to do it. This will be interesting none the less.

reply to post by Daedalus3


Sweet! Thanks for the links and info!

reply to post by Uber Fr0g


It appears NASA's hegemonic grip on higher resolution, publicly available lunar imaging will soon be usurped by the approaching multi-national space-bound paradigm.

Disclosure is inevitable, and coming soon to a planet near you.

Originally posted by Uber Fr0g
Oh NO! The United States moon bases and Alien bases alike will be Discovered and outed to the entire world!

Or a lot of people will be disappointed when new photos from other countries show no alien or U.S. bases or any abnormal structures. However, in order to maintain the illusion they will probably say the U.S. or NASA somehow forced them to alter and airbrush the images from the moon.

reply to post by kinda kurious


Kinda Kurious,

I was basing my assumptions on the Terrian Cameras (CCD cameras) on each of these probes. These would be working as normal digital cameras in my perception, i.e. viewing light in the visible spectrum.
Each of the probes(Japanese,Chinese, Indian and US) has one of these and I shared the comparative specs of those.
However I believe it would be possible to 'detect' the Apollo remanents by other means as well and some of these probes do indeed have interesting gadgets like laser altimeters and the likes. I don't know how good these gadgets would be in looking for Apollo remanents.

The Japanese probe does indeed have 3 orbital components. The main one has the CCD camera I was talking about(60 mile orbit). The ones with elliptical orbits however have no real terrain mapping capabilities.
They are used for measuring doppler shifts in light from the dark side of the moon.
Wiki Source on SELENE

The Indian orbiter Chandrayaan though has a mini-probe onboard that it will deploy(crash-land) on the lunar surface.. and this mini-probe does have a camera onboard.

Moon Impact probe(MIP) developed by ISRO is in turn a small satellite that will be carried by Chandrayaan-1 and will be ejected once it reaches 100 km orbit around moon, to impact on the moon. MIP carries three more instruments namely, a high resolution mass spectrometer, an S-Band altimeter and a video camera.

It seems that all onboard systems on this MIP will only function during the descent stage, i.e. nothing, including the camera, will work after impact.
The MIP's purpose is interesting and logical for future soft landing missions. Shows that India is serious about returning to the lunar surface in the form of unmanned(maybe manned) touchdowns.
MIP Link.

Recent news indicates that the scientists building Chandrayaan-1 are confident of Apr 9, 2008 as a launch date.

Strangely, I was unable to find similar gadgets on the chinese orbiter Chang'e-1 due to launch later this month.
If they plan future soft landings on the moon(and they have publicised such ambitions), such MIP-type submissions are critical to gather relevant data for future designs.
Or are they hiding many capabilities of that orbiter? You never know!