From the “Oh wow, that’s cool!” department:
US scientists are planning a 240,000-mile trip down memory lane – a tour of inspection of all the Apollo landing sites on the moon.
In 2008 a powerful camera aboard a new spacecraft called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will photograph the moon’s surface in fine detail – fine enough to pick out the Apollo 17 moon buggy abandoned 33 years ago, along with lunar landing platforms and other relics.
The camera will have a resolution of half a metre. So a moon buggy three metres long and two metres wide should show up clearly.
I wonder how long it will take before we start looking back at ourselves wondering how in the heck we ever made it to the Moon with such antiquated and risky methods and equipment. For as practical as the lunar landings and STS flights afterwards may look today, just think of how Apollo 11 will be mentioned in the same vein as Magellan, Drake, and Columbus.
Pretty cool stuff – and what’s better is that we can observe, catalog, and pass on our explorations in ways our forefathers could not.