{"id":37328,"date":"2011-07-24T15:43:50","date_gmt":"2011-07-24T15:43:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/a-space-age-mystery-to-celebrate-apollo%e2%80%99s-anniversary-bad-astronomy\/"},"modified":"2011-07-24T15:43:50","modified_gmt":"2011-07-24T15:43:50","slug":"a-space-age-mystery-to-celebrate-apollo%e2%80%99s-anniversary-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/a-space-age-mystery-to-celebrate-apollo%e2%80%99s-anniversary-bad-astronomy.php","title":{"rendered":"A space-age mystery to celebrate Apollo\u2019s anniversary | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night, at 02:56 UTC, it was the 42nd anniversary of humans putting a bootprint on another world. Before Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon, though, NASA and the USSR sent a fleet of unmanned probes there. Since that time we’ve sent many more, including the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of my favorite spacecraft of all time. It takes amazing high-res images of the Moon… and to celebrate today’s anniversary, they released this mysterious picture<\/a>:<\/p>

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Cooool. Click to enlunenate.<\/p>

This image is about 400 meters across, and shows an impact site with two lobes of material laid down to the sides. This butterfly-shape is a clear indication of a low-angle impact; it’s seen on many bodies in the solar system including the Moon, Mars, and even Earth (though the physics of exactly how the bi-lobed patterns form is still not well understood). Features like this are very rare… but it’s known that when a satellite orbit decays, it will impact at a low angle. <\/p>

As the LRO site<\/a> notes, in October 1967, the Lunar Orbiter 2 spacecraft impacted the lunar surface, possibly very near this spot. ...<\/p>

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<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night, at 02:56 UTC, it was the 42nd anniversary of humans putting a bootprint on another world. Before Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon, though, NASA and the USSR sent a fleet of unmanned probes there. Since that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37328"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}