By IANS/RIA Novosti,
Washington : A NASA spacecraft will move 30 km closer to the moon for a week to take clearer images of the Apollo lunar landing sites.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will relocate Aug 14 to allow its cameras to “obtain images of the Apollo sites that are about four times sharper” than the best pictures taken so far.
The LRO will return to its permanent 50-km orbit Aug 19, the project’s Twitter account said.
The orbiter will not decelerate from its 1.6 km per second speed when it gets closer to the moon’s surface, which might cause some image blurring, the Twitter post said.
Launched in June 2009, LRO and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) became the first missions launched as part of the US’ Vision for Space Exploration programme.