This image LO3-154-H was taken by Lunar Orbiter III on 20 February 1967 and shows the landing site for both Surveyor III (landed 20 April 1967) and Apollo 12 (landed 19 November 1969).
Figure 1 shows the region without labels. Figure 2 shows major features plus EVA routes.
This image has been recovered in its original high resolution format from original Lunar Orbiter project data tapes using restored tape drive hardware and will eventually be submitted to the PDS (Planetary Data System).
LOIRP Note: We will be putting the full resolution version of this image on the NASA Lunar Science Institute website with the layers preserved for Photoshop for all you folks to have fun with! We only ask that you send us copies of what you do and credit us if you publish it anywhere.
For more information on the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) visit https://moonviews.wpenginepowered.com
For information on NASA’s Lunar Science Institute visit http://lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov/
Keith, we really appreciate these new releases. Again, I can’t say enough… (maybe I can, I’ll think about that) how LOIRP has provided us with a whole new mission.
We already had the USGS PDS full .tif of III-154-H2 downloaded for some time. So, this morning we squeezed a comparison of that with one squeezed from this new release, to show the obvious and not so obvious “value-added.”
That can be seen HERE and HERE.
By the way… We’re grateful the full layers are being posted, as you mentioned, at NLSI. Could you give us a clue where that might be located on that site?
We’ve been unable to find the Fra Mauro landing site images, for example, mentioned earlier (except for those originals in the LPSI’s Orbiter Gallery, of course), and after a somewhat frustrating search.
Best wishes and sincere gratitude to everyone.
Dennis:
Can you zoom in on the Surveyor III for a better view of the spacecraft. That would be neat.
Keith’s note: this Lunar Orbiter image was taken BEFORE Surveyor III and Apollo 12 landed. Stay tuned. We’ll have an image of Surveyor I on the lunar surface online in a day or so.
Joel
Thanks for the kind words and the comparison is very interesting to the USGS scans.
What you will see with our images is that some will look a lot better than the USGS scans and some will not. The ones that will have the greatest improvements are the ones that have a lot of contrast. There is a document that I will post that shows how with the film scans the whites and the blacks are clipped. With this clipping shadows are much harsher and detail is lost.
Skeet, as Keith noted, the Lunar orbiter image was previous to the landing of Surveyor III. The Surveyor 1 image is coming soon.