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To: Bon mots

Also see http://www.youtube.com/user/TheLunarcolony posted recently.

Why do you imagine that the US Navy’s 1994 Clementine lunar high-res mapping images (likely able to resove images down to 1.5 square foot) remains classified? Clementine mapped the entire lunar surface, surface and mineral ... in color ...

(The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) consists of 2 narrow angle camera heads (NACs) to provide 0.5 m-scale panchromatic images over a 5-km swath, a wide angle camera head (WAC) to provide images at a scale of 100 m in seven color bands, and a common Sequence and Compressor System (SCS) to sequence image acquisition by all camera heads and compress their data before transmission to the spacecraft. )

and why would the US Navy be interested in mapping the moon in the first place?


30 posted on 06/28/2012 6:56:51 AM PDT by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now it is your turn ...)
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To: PIF

Clementine mission was to test SDI imagery and sensors. It ending up with the Navy was the result of some creative political funding to get it through a hostile Congress that tried to thwart President Reagan’s “Star Wars” space-based missile defense program at every turn. Turning it into a non-obvious military program to assist in space exploration allowed it to get the political support to actually happen. It was a huge success, which almost resulted in a Clementine II mission that would have found ice on the Moon much sooner.


31 posted on 07/01/2012 2:06:52 PM PDT by anymouse (God didn't write this sitcom we call life, he's just the critic.)
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