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The Lunar Orbit Insertion Burn

June 26 - At 8:25 a.m. EDT on June 26, LRO executed the Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) Burn No. 4. The 10-minute burn placed LRO in a 200 km circular polar orbit. Now in this low circular polar orbit, operations will begin to resemble the nominal mission with ground station passes coming and going on a regular frequency as the spacecraft passes behind the moon each orbit.

Rocket burns initiated by controllers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have helped the moon capture LRO, which arrived after a five-day journey.

Now LRO begins its primary mission of mapping the lunar surface to find future landing sites and searching for resources that would make possible a permanent human presence on the moon.

Over the next several days, LRO's instruments will be turned on and its final orbit around the moon will be reached.

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 On-board the LRO will be the LROC (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera) designed to address two of the prime measurement requirements: 1) Asses meter and smaller-scale features to facilitate safety analysis for potential lunar landing sites anywhere on the Moon; and 2) Acquire multi-temporal synoptic imaging of the poles every orbit to characterize the polar illumination environment (on a 100 meter scale), identifying regions of permanent shadow and near-permanent illumination over a full lunar year.

The LROC consists of two narrow-angle cameras (NACs) to provide 0.5 meter scale panchromatic images over a 5 km swath, a wide-angle camera component (WAC) to provide images at a scale of 100 meters in seven color bands over 100 km swath in black and white mode and 60 km in color mode, and a common Sequence and Compressor System (SCS).

... additional imaging goals:

Multiple co-registered observations of portions of potential landing sites using high-resolution topography / stereogrammetric and photometric stereo analyses.

A global 100-m/pixel basemap with incidence angles (60-80 degrees) favorable for morphologic interpretations.

Sub-meter imaging of a variety of geologic units to characterize physical properties, variability of the regolith, and key science questions.

Meter-scale coverage overlapping with Apollo era Panoramic Images (1-2 m/pixel) to document the number of small impacts since 1971-1972...

Source: NASA LRO Instrument Suite and Objectives document.

Drawing from the definition of "Structure", ULOs have the following qualities:

• The arrangement of and relations between the parts or elements of something complex. (n. structure)
• A building or other object constructed from several parts. (n. structure)
• The quality of being organized. (n. structure)
• An apparent 'Form Follows Function' that sets it apart from nearby elements or terrain.
• The object or cluster of objects resists definition as lunar geology.