Change Detection on the Moon

NASA’s upcoming robotic mission to the Moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will join orbiters from China, India and Japan is all about making a good map.

Planners will use data from the 12-month mapping mission to begin picking a site for the human outpost that is the current U.S. human-exploration goal by 2020.

Another use: change detection:

“We want to image some of the area mapped by the Apollo program with our high-resolution camera in order to see how many impacts have occurred there in the past 30 years, and that will help us to improve the understanding of the meteor flux onto the Moon,” says Richard Vondrak, LRO project scientist and deputy director of the Solar System Exploration Div. at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

- Aviation Week