All articles
🔭 Science 5 min in app

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter: the satellite that won't stop measuring

NASA launched a satellite called Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in 2009. The original mission was to map the Moon in high resolution to prepare for an eventual crewed return. The LRO is still active today, generating data that nearly every later lunar mission uses as reference.

The main instruments

LROC (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera). Three cameras: one wide-angle that covers entire ground swaths, and two high-resolution cameras that can see details around 50 cm. It was the LROC that photographed the Apollo landing sites from a height good enough to identify human footprints, abandoned equipment, and the path the astronauts walked.

LOLA (Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter). Takes altitude measurements with laser pulses. It has already sent billions of measurements, generating the most precise topographic map of any Solar System body outside Earth. The vertical precision is about 10 cm at individual points.

Diviner. A thermal radiometer that measures lunar surface temperature across several wavelength bands. It was Diviner that confirmed some polar craters have temperatures below 40 K, cold enough for water ice to stay stable for billions of years.

LAMP (Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project). Detects ultraviolet light. Uses light reflected by stars to observe permanently shadowed regions, places where direct sunlight never reaches.

The rest of this essay reads aloud, in your voice.

Lunar Cycles narrates every article using the text-to-speech voices installed on your device. Free, offline, in any installed language. Plus precise alarms for every moon phase, supermoon, and eclipse.

Listen to the full essay

Free in Lunar Cycles

Install