Catalog Page for PIA14114

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PIA14114: The Moon as seen by MESSENGER

Target Name:	Moon
Is a satellite of:	Earth
Mission:	Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) MESSENGER
Spacecraft:	Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter MESSENGER
Instrument:	Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (NAC) MDIS - Wide Angle
Product Size:	670 x 670 pixels (w x h)
Produced By:	Johns Hopkins University/APL
Other Information:	More details and images at LROC
Full-Res TIFF:	PIA14114.tif (449.6 kB)
Full-Res JPEG:	PIA14114.jpg (7.953 kB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

Image of Earth's moon taken by NASA's MESSENGER's Wide Angle Camera. The MESSENGER MDIS view of the Moon is centered about -60°, 280°.

This image is the Moon as seen from the MESSENGER spacecraft on July 31, 2005, less than a year after the spacecraft's launch from Cape Canaveral. The lunar image was taken by the MESSENGER Wide Angle Camera (WAC), which is part of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS). At the time when the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 992,814 kilometers (616,906 miles) from the Earth.

Click on image for larger version

LROC WAC 400 m/pixel orthographic projection similar to the view seen from MESSENGER on 31 July 2005 [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University]

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center built and manages the mission for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera was designed to acquire data for landing site certification and to conduct polar illumination studies and global mapping. Operated by Arizona State University, LROC consists of a pair of narrow-angle cameras (NAC) and a single wide-angle camera (WAC). The mission is expected to return over 70 terabytes of image data.

Image Credit:

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Image Addition Date:

2011-03-18