Moon images

Now, a prototype radar system being tested at the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia just took the most detailed photo of the moon from Earth using a transmitter less powerful than a microwave oven. "It's pretty amazing what we've been able to capture so far, using less power than a common household appliance," Patrick Taylor, radar division head for GBO and NRAO, said in a statement. The prototype is a collaboration between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Green Bank Observatory (GBO), and Raytheon Intelligence & Space (RIS). The partnership is designing a next-generation planetary radar system for the GBT that could be used to study celestial bodies in our solar system. For the test, engineers equipped GBT with a radar transmitter using 700 watts of power. They pointed the transmitter at the moon and radar echoes were returned to the NRAO's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), which has 10 antennas across the United States. The result was a hyper-detailed image of the Tycho Crater with 16.4-foot (5-meter) resolution — the highest-resolution image of the moon from Earth ever taken. — — — The team tested the prototype on a space rock as well as the moon. "In our tests, we were able to zero in on an asteroid 2.1 million kilometers [1.3 million miles] away from us — more than five times the distance from the Earth to the moon," Taylor said. "The asteroid is about a kilometer [0.6 miles] in size, which is large enough to caus...

Now, a prototype radar system being tested at the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia just took the most detailed photo of the moon from Earth using a transmitter less powerful than a microwave oven. "It's pretty amazing what we've been able to capture so far, using less power than a common household appliance," Patrick Taylor, radar division head for GBO and NRAO, said in a statement. The prototype is a collaboration between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Green Bank Observatory (GBO), and Raytheon Intelligence & Space (RIS). The partnership is designing a next-generation planetary radar system for the GBT that could be used to study celestial bodies in our solar system. For the test, engineers equipped GBT with a radar transmitter using 700 watts of power. They pointed the transmitter at the moon and radar echoes were returned to the NRAO's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), which has 10 antennas across the United States. The result was a hyper-detailed image of the Tycho Crater with 16.4-foot (5-meter) resolution — the highest-resolution image of the moon from Earth ever taken. — — — The team tested the prototype on a space rock as well as the moon. "In our tests, we were able to zero in on an asteroid 2.1 million kilometers [1.3 million miles] away from us — more than five times the distance from the Earth to the moon," Taylor said. "The asteroid is about a kilometer [0.6 miles] in size, which is large enough to caus...