NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been caught out at its own game.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been studying the moon up close since 2009. It has also imaged other lively spacecraft on the lunar surface, comparable to China’s Yutu 2 rover, and even other moon orbiters (opens in recent tab).
And now, a newcomer to lunar orbit recently spotted LRO from a distance of just 11.2 miles (18 kilometers) because the probes zipped by one another of their respective orbits.
Related: Amazing moon photos by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
The Korea Aerospace Research Institute’s (KARI) Danuri spacecraft arrived in lunar orbit in mid-December 2022. Aboard is ShadowCam, a NASA-funded hypersensitive optical imager, which is in a position to provide views into shadowed areas by collecting light reflected off nearby landforms and light-weight reflected from our planet onto the moon, or “Earthshine.”
This time, as a substitute of illuminating shadowed craters, ShadowCam captured a sunlit LRO as each spacecraft omitted a patch of moon shrouded in darkness.
The stunt required coordination and timing, because the two spacecraft passed one another with a relative velocity of seven,113 mph (11,447 kph). The NASA LRO mission operations team at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland oriented the spacecraft relative to Daunri and the sun to permit the radiator and back of the spacecraft to be brightly illuminated, in line with a post (opens in recent tab) on the ShadowCam webpages.
The high speed of the near encounter and the exposure time of ShadowCam ends in LRO being doubly exposed 4 times in the ultimate image. An animation from the ShadowCam team illustrates the features of LRO captured within the image, including the spacecraft’s solar array, radiator and high-gain antenna, by transitioning from the captured image to a computer-generated high-resolution image.
ShadowCam, which relies on LRO’s powerful principal camera, is getting used to find out about shadowed areas on the lunar south pole ahead of NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, mapping out permanently shadowed areas. (Artemis 3 will land astronauts near the south pole, the primary crewed return to the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972.) Meanwhile, Danuri has other cameras aboard, which recently captured epic views of iconic lunar features.
Closer to home, a Maxar Earth-observation satellite recently captured an up-close take a look at NASA’s Landsat 8 spacecraft in low Earth orbit, demonstrating how satellite imagery will be used for potentially trying out the health or causes of issues for satellites.
