The LADEE mission sent pictures of the lunar back to Earth taken that were taken with onboard camera systems called "star trackers."
The star trackers are meant to capture images of star systems surrounding the craft; this allows it to gauge how it is oriented in space. The star trackers take these images several times a minute, a NASA news release reported.
"Star tracker cameras are actually not very good at taking ordinary images," Butler Hine LADEE project manager at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field said in the news release. "But they can sometimes provide exciting glimpses of the lunar terrain."
The trackers have a wide-angle that allows it to capture as much of the sky as possible. These images were acquired while the craft was busy taking atmospheric measurements. The images were taken at one-minute intervals and depict areas of the "northern western hemisphere of the moon," the news release reported.
The spacecraft was traveling at speeds of about 60 miles per hour; the images are taken during the lunar night and the surface is illuminated by Earthshine.
The first image shows the moon's 14-mile-in-diameter smooth-floored Krieger crater with Toscanelli in front; the second image depicts Wollaston P, which is about two-and-a-half miles in diameter; the third displays a "minor lunar mountain range," dubbed Montes Agricola; the fourth shows Golgi, which is about four miles in diameter.
"The final image views craters Lichtenberg A and Schiaparelli E in the smooth mare basalt plains of Western Oceanus Procellarum, west of the Aristarchus plateau," the news release reported.
The star tracker will continue to take images as it continues on its mission. The craft will analyze the chemical composition of the lunar atmosphere. One goal of the mission is to find out if lunar diust is electrically charged as a result of sunlight; this could explain the "pre-sunrise glow" seen above the horizon during the Apollo missions.
