NASA | HD Lunar Flyover of the First Images from the LRO Camera

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A starkly beautiful region a few kilometers east of Hell E crater, which is located on the floor of the ancient Imbrian-aged Deslandres impact structure in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium. Numerous small, secondary craters can be identified, including several small crater chains. Also identifiable are distinctive lineations made readily apparent by the extreme lighting, representing ejecta from a nearby impact. The NAC image shown here has not been calibrated and the pixel values were stretched to enhance contrast. The full image width is 3.5 kilometers making features discernable down to a few meters in size.

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Credit: NASA/GSFC/ASU

[Anonymoose]

Wow! HD + full screen + new 23" monitor = utterly incredible. Never in history have we seen the moon in this much detail. And this is merely the beginning.

[danielbigham]

I'm loving this "HD" button... fabulous imagery. Great work to the LRO team! You're whetting our appetites for moon adventures.

[Aiden]

Beautiful sequence. I could watch it for hours and thanks for not including any corny music. :-)

[Randallh]

HD cameras sure bring it to life, compared to the crappy cameras of 40yrs ago.

[Dargakis]

Wow, HD and all that and still no colour,
great Nasa, just great..

[jasonpaladin]

Nice video quality, cool to see the moon's surface from not far.

[muzicmaker]

How is it that we can have near HD quality photos of Mars and the surface in such incredible detail but cannot take even one photo of the Apollo moon landing sites showing the American flag, rover, etc?

[tdetoy]

The reason we're doing this is because we don't have geographical information on the moon that is this detailed, nor on this large of a scale. Considering an *eventual* goal is a moon base for low gravity/microgravity research, it's important to consider where to place it. This is crucial for that research, and for general knowledge about the moon and the greater celestial expanse. And it's doing several orbits, so we'll get a lot of pictures from this.

[astroroadshow]

APex; These new pics are of a far higher resolution than ever achieved before. They are required in order to find serious places to land, explore, mine, set up bases etc. The highest resolution should be at around 1mt, good enough to image the Lunar Rovers left there almost 40 yrs ago.

[coolchanga]

it would be very interesting to see how that camera works !!

[DjSharperimage]

pretty cool;
you guys should do a flyover of the MOON BASES

[Mathview]

Congratulations LRO for successful First images! And three questions (1) Is the camera sending a color image or is it purely grey scale? and (2) Why does the lunar surface seem so colorless? Aren't there colorful mineral deposits or other features? (3) Can you point the camera back at earth for a classic earthrise on moon shot?

[TraceurZeno]

Amazing images although hard to get a sense of scale.

Beautiful and appreciated though!

Zeno

[nsane]

The moon has resources. Possible H2O in the ice means possible liquid nitrogen for a possible fuel source, which means we wouldn't have to spend BILLIONS of dollars getting things into space if we can simply build them there. Spending money exploring the moon is a lot cheaper in the long run than we've been doing things so far. It's going to be used as a spaceport for future space missions to other planets like Mars (maybe not in our lifetime) but that's the benefit of moon exploration.

[AcrossTheRiverStix]

yes, shaula359, I agree :) but Mother Earth covered up a lot of impact evidence with water, dirt, erosion, etc! I can't wait for more pictures either!!!

[supersetan]

There .... !!!! I see Starscream!! :-D

[mcclshawn]

Someone please note what time I should look at, in this video, that shows ANY of the stuff left on the Moon. Check out "Google Moon"..Why does the Apollo 11 area get diff images? The resolution is there on the rest of the moon, why not the same images for Apollo 11 area?

[BinkieMcFartnuggets]

This is almost exactly what the mother ship from Independence Day saw, just with less clarity.

[WeAreTheRobots]

@cadu1995
So what do you expect?
I can anticipate that if they sent a probe to take close pictures you would say they just put the necessary parts there.

[IzackN]

@cadu1995 Those 40 years never happened?

WHERE HAVE I BEEN ALL THIS TIME?!