Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter zooms in on Apollo 15 once again

March 12, 2012 - The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling our closest neighbor since 2009, taking amazing substantial-resolution pictures of the Moon's surface. When it was first proposed, I remember wondering if it would get good shots of the Apollo web sites… and boy howdy, did it. Then, in 2011, NASA made a decision to lower the mapping orbit from its typical fifty km (30 miles) down to an extraordinary 25 km (15 miles) — an orbit they can't maintain, since versions in the density of the Moon would shortly crash the spacecraft.