Friday, March 30, 2012

1st Student Selected MoonKAM Pictures Look Inspiringly Home to Earth

1st Student Selected MoonKAM Pictures Look Inspiringly Home to Earth:

Student-run MoonKAM Imager Looks Homeward - You are Here !
This image of the far side of the lunar surface, with Earth in the background, was taken by the MoonKAM system aboard the Ebb spacecraft as part of the first image set taken from lunar orbit from March 15 – 18, 2012 by NASA's GRAIL mission. The target was selected by 4th grade students at Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Montana who had the honor of choosing the first MoonKAM images after winning a nationwide contest. A little more than half-way up and on the left side of the image is the crater De Forest. Due to its proximity to the southern pole, DeForest receives sunlight at an oblique angle when it is on the illuminated half of the Moon. NASA/Caltech-JPL/MIT/SRS
See below 1st Full View of the Earth from the Moon -
taken 1966 and compare
The first student selected photos of the Moon’s surface snapped by NASA’s new pair of student named Lunar Mapping orbiters – Ebb & Flow - have just been beamed back and show an eerie view looking back to the Home Planet – and all of Humanity – barely rising above the pockmarked terrain of the mysterious far side of our nearest neighbor in space.
Congratulations to Americas’ Youth on an outstanding and inspiring choice !!
The student photo is reminiscent of one of the iconic images of Space Exploration – the first full view of the Earth from the Moon taken by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1 back in August 1966 (see below).
The images were taken in the past few days by the MoonKAM camera system aboard NASA’s twin GRAIL spacecraft currently circling overhead in polar lunar orbit, and previously known as GRAIL A and B. (...)
Read the rest of 1st Student Selected MoonKAM Pictures Look Inspiringly Home to Earth (1,003 words)



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