SELENE mission

[aphh]

Wow! HD video from Kagya nearing landing is terrific.

Moon is our sister planet. That it is presumably dead is not a reason to ignore it. We should be back there already.

 

[3488]

Final seven images from the Kaguya / Selene HDTV camera. Awesome stuff.

Note the final two show individual boulders.

Andrew Brown.

 

[JonClarke]

Awesome!

 

[centsworth_II]

I wonder how big that one big boulder lit up in the last frame is.

 

[3488]

Awesome!

Hi Jon, I agree completely.

It was a fantastic end to the mission & these final few images will also be of important scientific value.

I wonder how big that one big boulder lit up in the last frame is.

Hi Centsworth,

Great question, I will try & find out. The first four frames are quite obvious, mountains & craters, but the final two are from somewhat lower down & is difficult to get a scale. That shadowed final image is certainly covering a very small area, so difficult to tell how large that boulder is.

A boulder it certainly is, perhaps not to unlike the one at the Apollo 17 site. Certainly these are the highest resolution images of the Lunar south polar region.

I pulled the following from the Kaguya / Selene site.

Image No. Observation time on June 11, 2009 (JST) Location Altitude Note
1 At 3:11 a.m. Around at lat. 74 deg. S, long. 261 deg. E 27.8km Near Zeeman G and BOLTZMANN
2 At 3:12 a.m. Around at lat. 77 deg. S, long. 261 deg. E 25.4km Between BOLTZMANN and Drygalski
3 At 3:13 a.m. Around at lat. 79 deg. S, long. 261 deg. E 23.0km Near side of Drygalski P (Diameter: about 30 km)
4 At 3:14 a.m. Around at lat. 81 deg. S, long. 261 deg. E 20.7km Around Drygalski P
5 At 3:15 a.m. Around at lat. 83 deg. S, long. 261 deg. E 18.4km South of Drygalski
6 At 3:16 a.m. Around at lat. 86 deg. S, long. 262 deg. E 16.2km South of Drygalski
7 At 3:17 a.m. Around at lat. 89 deg. S, long. 266 deg. E 14.1km Around DE GERLACHE (Diameter: about 32 km).

Final Kaguya / Selene Image track.

Andrew Brown.

 

[freya]

I wonder how big that one big boulder lit up in the last frame is.

About as big as a tennis ball :lol:

 

[3488]

Video of final descent using the Terrain Camera.

Andrew Brown.

 

[centsworth_II]

A boulder it certainly is, perhaps not to unlike the one at the Apollo 17 site.

Yeah, my wild guess is "house sized". The question is... my house or Bill Gates' house.

 

[3488]

A boulder it certainly is, perhaps not to unlike the one at the Apollo 17 site.

Yeah, my wild guess is "house sized". The question is... my house or Bill Gates' house.

:mrgreen: :mrgreen: Good point :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

Or even Britain's largest Council house, Buckingham Palace. :lol: :lol: :lol: If it was the size of my flat, that Kaguya would have had to have landed to see it. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

But in all seriousness, it is very difficult to guage the size of the boulders in the last shot.

JAXA only revealed that Kaguya / Selene was 14 KM, above the surface at the time, so still quite high up, but with the HDTV having the zoom capability, would have made Kaguya / Selene appear much lower than it really was. They have not said how wide the area in the shot was.

IIRC it the the Narrow Angle aperture of the HDTV that was facing forward (that would make sense to me anyway). In a shame they crashed Kauya / Selene in a shadowed area. I know perfectly well why they did it. but in some ways a day lit crash landing would have revealed much about the landscape near the lunar south pole.

Crashing stuff into the permanently shadowed areas in the lunar polar regions IMHO, will NOT reveal ice, because IMO, there is none there. True it s cold enough, approx minus 223 Celsius on the permanetly shadowed floors of craters like Shackleton, but I do not think the current lunar polar regions have always been & icy comets impacting in these areas would deliver so much energy that all volatiles would be driven off. I suspect these areas, though very cold, are still bone dry, perhaps Wayne will know more than me about this.

We'll know much more with LCROSS in October, but somehow I think that too will also draw a blank, just kicking up a dust plume, though that is a fascinating mission & the results will be very interesting, regardless (I hope to watch it live when that Centaur Upper Stage slams into the surface).

I also have similar doubts about Chao Meng Fu crater at the south pole on Mercury (a second LCROSS type mission there would be very interesting & be able to compare like for like or unlike with the Moon), as well as other shadowed craters on Mercury, as I do for the Moon.

Hopefully JAXA will release the full size of those seven images in time.

I had use of another computer earlier, so I was able to see the LCROSS video at long last as well as the Kaguya / Selene ones. Now I'm back on my home computer, that has a corruption that will not play them, they are once again inaccesible to me.

Andrew Brown.