new moon pics???

[mikejohnson]

hello all, is there any new pictures of the landing sites on the moon?  a couple years ago i saw some from nasa that showed the landing sites and some footprints and trails, they werent very good, at that time i heard there were some private companies that were going to have some better pictures. but i havent heard on any yet. is there any good pictures yet?

[Laurel]

Welcome to the board. How do you define good?

[RAF]

...a couple years ago i saw some from nasa that showed the landing sites and some footprints and trails, they werent very good...

I must also ask, given that you can actually see where the astronauts walked,. what would you consider good?

...or should I say, how much better would you expect images from orbit to be???

[mikejohnson]

well the ones that i saw i could barely make out what was really there,and the report that i saw said the nasa photoes would be more refined and that there were other parties that expected to have better pics

[sts60]

Hello, mikejohnson.  Welcome to the board.

Those are really quite good for imagery from (lunar) orbit.  They compare well to Earth imagery taken from commercial Earth-imaging satellites - I've worked on such systems.  So I can't agree that they're not "good". 

Anyway, it will be some years yet before any private company sends anything better to the Moon, because it's very expensive and not particularly easy.  The LRO images are the best we'll have for several years - other than, of course, the images taken on the lunar surface by the Apollo crews themselves.

[Echnaton]

The are no better images than what you have probably already seen.  But like you, we would love to see some.

[gwiz]

Since first imaging the Apollo sites, the LRO has manoeuvred to a lower orbit giving better resolution.  The newer pictures of the landing sites are considerably better than the ones from the initial orbit.  Here's a link:
http://www.space.com/12796-photos-apollo-moon-landing-sites-lro.html

[Abaddon]

Since first imaging the Apollo sites, the LRO has manoeuvred to a lower orbit giving better resolution.  The newer pictures of the landing sites are considerably better than the ones from the initial orbit.  Here's a link:
http://www.space.com/12796-photos-apollo-moon-landing-sites-lro.html

Err, the captions all say they photos were taken in 1972. Something amiss, surely? Thaey are all LRO pix AFAIK.

[gwiz]

Err, the captions all say they photos were taken in 1972. Something amiss, surely? Thaey are all LRO pix AFAIK.

The first few pics are captioned correctly.  The problem starts after they put in the surface pic of the flag, which was taken in 1969.  Looks like someone started editing in the Apollo mission dates instead of the actual photo dates.

[twik]

If by "good" you mean a probe landed right next to one of the craft, and snapped closeups, it's unlikely you will ever see that.

Myself, I think it's stunning that we have been shown the actual remaining footprints on the Moon. How much better than that can we get?