The Moon as seen by MESSENGER

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Caption:

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.

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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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