LROC PDS Release Number 5

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Caption:

LROC WAC mosaic centered on Orientale basin. From the center of the mosaic to a corner is about 2000 km.

This image is an orthographic reprojection of the WAC global mosaic centered on the youngest large basin on the Moon, Orientale. This basin is barely visible on the western limb of the Moon as seen from the Earth. Its existence was not confirmed until spacecraft sent back images of the farside 50 years ago. Unlike other large basins, Orientale has very little volcanic materials filling its interior, so the basin structure is easily seen. The inner and outer basin rings are particulary obvious - imagine if the Moon were rotated 90° and the Orientale basin faced the Earth. What sort of mythology would have grown up around the great eyeball in the sky?

Background Info:

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.

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