Little by little we’re getting sharper, clearer pictures from the Chinese Chang’e 3 moon mission. Yesterday the lander beamed back a series of new photos taken with its panoramic camera. Stitched together, they give us a more detailed and colorful look of the rover’s surroundings in northern Mare Imbrium. I’ve ordered the images starting with a nice crisp view of the Yutu rover; from there we turn by degree to the right across the five frames. The final mosaic unfortunately doesn’t have the resolution yet of the other images. Perhaps one will be published soon.
One thing that stands out to my eye when looking at the photos is the brown color of the lunar surface soil or regolith. Color images of the moon’s surface by the Apollo astronauts along with their verbal descriptions indicate a uniform gray color punctuated in rare spots by patches of more colorful soils.
The famous orange soil scooped up by Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan comes to mind. Because Apollo visited six different moonscapes – all essentially gray – it makes me wonder if the color balance in the Chinese images might be off. Or did Chang’e 3 just happen to land on browner soils?
there is just a little more red and green in Chang’e 3 Images.
Didn’t they land on the border between two terrains? One darker than the other….
http://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-images-of-change-3-landing-site/#.UtrWSVLTkng
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/change3_wac_morph_and_noslew_1000p_1000p.png?itok=Nsd0cEZc
These basaltic terrains surfaced and re-surfaced with Fe and TiO2-rich regolith after the, so-called, late heavy bombardment that originally created the Imbrium basin. The Imbrium Flows effected the surface here almost a billion years after the basin formed. And there is almost certainly a mix between the two kinds of surfaces in the immediate area (seen more clearly in the Clementine UVVIS false color), if only from what’s been tossed up by nearby small impacts.
These appear to be excellently re-formatted segments of the lander panorama swept up Dec. 17 through Dec. 18, and released with the Preliminary Science Results from the CAS.
Its great to see new pictures from the moon after all these years, thanks China I had almost given up hope,…….Also continued success with this outstanding mission
Or maybe some of apollos images where shot in a studio!
Why is the apparent orison so close like the ”rover” is staying on a mound. If the sea of tranquility is ”flat” the perspective should be at least few kilometers and not few tens of meters. Then the ski is pitch black… not even a star … not even with 21st century tech…. And if the Bugs Bunny is equipped with nuke techy to stay worm at night why not we don;t get any data from ‘night time dreams’… Selfish Communists…. And so more…. if the lunar surface is BOMBARDED for millions of years with meteorites and micrometeorites where are the craters of mini and micro meteorites on the pictures…. And to keep the conspiracy theory alive I don’t think we are getting the real thing from the moon… I;m very disappointed that we got non of the footage of the flight from Earth to the moon….. NOTHING> and then …. for our comfort… for the moon landing we got only the simulation and the same rocket visual effect like the Apollo missions. No disturbance on the ground produced from the boosters. HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. And hey…. no pics of our beloved mother Earth …… nothing. That is what we get from you China, and the US and the rest of you orcs, NOTHING. Thanks for nothing
Manually combined them into a poor man’s panorama. There is almost no overlap in the individual images and even a gap in the center.
Do people really still believe in this nonsense?