A Stunning New Photo Of The Chinese Lunar Lander Taken From Orbit
Since Chinese lander Chang'e 4 landed on the far side of the moon on January 3, it's sent back some extremely cool images and videos of parts of the lunar surface that had never been seen up close before. Now, we have a picture of the lander itself, taken from orbit by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Well, kinda. You're going to have to zoom in a bit to actually see the lunar lander.
See those two arrows pointing to a tiny dot in the lower righthand quadrant of the image? Yep, that's the lander. (The Yutu 2 rover that's been exploring the lunar surface is so small it's not detectable even when you zoom in.) For a sense of scale, "The sharp crater behind and to the left of the landing site is 3900 meters across (12,800 feet) and 600 meters (1970 feet) deep," explains the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera website. The photo also shows the west wall of the much larger Von Kármán Crater, which is 186 kilometers (116 miles) in diameter — that's what those mountains in the background are.
If you can't quite make out the two-pixel-wide lander in the version above, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera website has a zoomable version.
[LROC via Bad Astronomy]
