Freaky View from Lunar Orbit Shows Chinese Lander on the Moon's Far Side
George Dvorsky
Yesterday 10:55am
Filed to: LUNAR DESOLATION
An image captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Chang’e 4 landing site from a distance of over 200 miles, revealing both the probe and the desolate lunar landscape around it.
We know the Moon is dead and dark, but wow does this black-and-white photograph ever drive that message home. China’s Chang’e 4 lander appears as a two-pixel-wide speck in the NASA photo, providing an incredible sense of scale. Earth has its fair share of barren landscapes, but there’s something truly dreary and forbidding about the Moon. It’s just so... alien.
When the Chang’e 4 spacecraft made it to the Moon’s far side in early January, it landed on the floor of the Von Kármán crater, a feature named in honor of Theodore von Kármán—a pioneering scientist during the early days of the U.S. space program. This large impact crater formed about 3.9 billion years ago, and it measures around 186 kilometers (116 miles) in diameter.
On January 30, 2019, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter approached the landing site from the east, snapping the pic at a distance of 330 kilometers (205 miles) from the Chang’e 4 lander. The Chinese probe appears as a tiny white dot, and its mobile companion, the Yutu 2 rover, is so small it cannot be seen.
More:
https://gizmodo.com/freaky-view-from-lunar-orbit-shows-chinese-lander-on-th-1832425714
