This image is my poster for the 2026 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference which I am attending virtually because - you can imagine. It has 8 panels containing text and images, comparing high resolution images of various spacecraft landing sites from LRO's camera (LROC-NAC) and the OHRC camera on India's Chandrayaan 2 orbiter. OHRC images have up to 4 times the resolution of typical recent LROC images because LRO is in a higher orbit than wen it started. The OHRC images show some important details impossible to see with LROC. For SLIM, the LEV-1 hopping rover is probably what is seen by OHRC adjacent to the lander. For Chandrayaan 2, which crashed, the largest fragment is seen by LROC to have left a dark track as it rolled or bounced, but OHRC resolves a line of small pits. For Chandrayaan 3 a paper by Iyer et al. last year showed that OHRC before-after differencing revealed small dark spots where the Pragyan rover made a comm turn after every drive. At IM-2 Athena's site unique gouges in the regolith must have been made by the lander footpads as it touched down twice before falling into a crater.
... I show the new thing: the LEV-1 hopping rover for SLIM, rover turning marks at Chandrayaan 3, a row of bounce pits for Chandrayaan 2, the remarkable footpad gouges at IM-2 Athena's site. I point out that the new imaging service from Firefly, Ocula, will […]
[Original post on mastodon.social]
