6/24/2023 0 Comments Picture of meteoroidTechnically, a meteoroid becomes a meteorite when it hits the ground. And now it has a cool (if very wee) scar to show off! It’s one of my favorite spacecraft, so I’m glad it made it. You can’t be too safe when you’re in space.Īnyway, LRO survived the incident, and has been working just fine in the years since. Just in case, of course, the International Space Station has patch kits in strategic locations in case of small hits. Space is pretty big (that’s why we call it space), so even though there’s a lot of stuff out there, the odds of getting hit are low. Your kilometerage might vary.Įvents like this are pretty rare, despite everything I learned from cheesy movies when I was a kid. He says it sounds like SPANG to him, but SPONG sounds closer to me. SPANG /cPJVDbbHXg- Alex Parker May 26, 2017 Here's a first-pass audio reconstruction of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter micrometeoroid strike, estimated from image oscillation. Eventually the vibrations stopped, though the lunar terrain in the image is so odd looking it’s hard to tell precisely where. The wavy pattern is due to the initial hit and then the resulting vibrations dying down. The NAC was taking such a sweep when it got hit. This is actually a fairly common technique for space-based cameras it’s easier to build and operate, reads out quickly, and uses less power (it’s also how a lot of desktop scanners works that’s why the bar moves across the page it’s scanning). But a moment later the camera has moved, so if it takes another picture, then another, it can build up a two-dimension image one row at a time. ![]() So a single image would represent a swath lunar territory 0.5 meters by 2532 meters across. ![]() This is the clever bit: Each pixel on the camera sees a certain amount of landscape underneath it, roughly 0.5 meter on a side. But it’s orbiting the Moon, so the camera is moving (and oriented so that the row is perpendicular to the direction of motion). It has a single row of 5064 light-sensitive pixels, so if it just sat there and took a picture it would be a single line 5064 pixels long. The Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) uses what’s called a push broom technique to take images. Apparently, one of the narrow angle cameras got hit, because the other two cameras don’t show anything amiss. The LRO Camera is actually three cameras: One that’s wide angle, and two that are narrow angle.
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