July 23, 2009

Apollo Landing Sites Pose a Threat to LRO Instrument

Written by Nancy Atkinson

The recent images released by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of the Apollo landing sites are truly remarkable. But there is one instrument on board LRO that must avoid studying some of the the Apollo sites as well as other places where humans have placed spacecraft on the the lunar surface.

The Lunar Orbiting Laser Altimeter (LOLA) pulses a single laser beam down to the surface to create a high-resolution global topographic map of the Moon. However, LOLA is turned off when it passes over the Apollo sites because bouncing the laser off any of the retro-reflective mirrors on experiments left by the astronauts might damage the instrument.

Don Mitchell, who owns a software consulting company and is writing a book on the Soviet Exploration of Venus, wrote about this problem on his blog, saying that if LOLA's beam did strike the retro reflector experiment, "the light bounced back would be 1,000 times the detector damage threshold."

Full article here:

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/07/23/apollo-landing-sites-pose-a-threat-to-lro-instrument/

To quote:

As Mitchell wrote, "While conspiracy nuts debate the reality of the Apollo landings, scientists must deal with some practical consequences of what astronauts put on the Moon."