Thank you, thank you, Phage. I've been making a decidedly feeble attempt to keep up with the LRO's journey, and this will most certainly help the cause.

Hi Phage,

When is the rocket body supposed to strike the moon? July 7th was what I thought. Am I right?

Thanks for the website, Phage.

I just looked at the past orbits (I think you can only look back 3 past orbits) and it seemed to me that the LRO was just recently over the Apollo 11 landing site (perhaps 9 or so orbits prior to the time of this post).

Wouldn't it be a great present if on July 20th (the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing) NASA would release a high-res picture of the landing site. Hopefully the camera was operating well enough during that fly-over, or hopefully it will orbit over the Apollo 11 site again before July 20th.

The Moon is presently in its first quarter phase, so the Apollo 11 landing site just recently rotated into the "lit" part of the Moon (that area was in darkness until recently, and will be dark again in a couple of weeks).


[edit on 6/29/2009 by Soylent Green Is People]

Perhaps you could enlighten me on why the cameras need to be heated up before they can be used phage?

I'm just thinking that they would work out of the box??

~Keeper

When do we get to see evidence of all the moon landing sites then?

After they have had time to take the pics and add CGI?

Originally posted by VitalOverdose
When do we get to see evidence of all the moon landing sites then?

After they have had time to take the pics and add CGI?

Actually I personally suspect they'll try to image tranquility base on or before the 40th anniversary rolls around. You've already come to your conlusion before seeing the first pixel though, so it's obvious that no amount of evidence will convince you it wasn't fake.

[edit on 2-7-2009 by ngchunter]

Seeing pics of all the landing sites before the the probe had time to make a few orbits while its 'cams warmed up' would have gone a long way to making me a believer.

Originally posted by VitalOverdose
Seeing pics of all the landing sites before the the probe had time to make a few orbits while its 'cams warmed up' would have gone a long way to making me a believer.

How could they get pics of all the landing sites before the probe had time to make a few orbits? You do realize that there are 6 landing sites, all in different areas of the Moon right? Plus LRO wasn't in the proper orbit when it first entered Lunar orbit. It was in a 220 km by 3100 km and then it spent 5 days adjusting its orbit to a 30 km by 199 km commissioning orbit. The probe is still in a commissioning phase and isn't even in it's final orbit yet. It takes time allow each team to turn on, test and calibrate each of the 7 instruments on board.

Space probes do not operate like a consumer product. You don't just push the power button and start taking pictures right away. Everything has to be checked out to make sure it's all working properly. You don't want to risk doing something that causes a $500 million dollar spacecraft to shutdown or not work properly.