Lunar crater counting shows crowdsourcing is accurate tool

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A new study showed that as a group, volunteer counters who examined a particular patch of lunar real estate using NASA images did just as well in identifying individual craters as professional crater counters with five to 50 years of experience. The crater-counting effort was initiated by CosmoQuest, a citizen science Web project that contributes real science to NASA space missions through the use of volunteers. In addition to analyzing high-resolution photos of the moon, the volunteers are helping planetary scientists tally craters on Mercury and the asteroid Vesta.

via Science Daily

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Apollo 17 VIP Site Anaglyph

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Get out your red/blue glasses and check out this stereo scene from Taurus-Littrow valley on the Moon! The color anaglyph features a detailed 3D view of Apollo 17's Lunar Rover in the foreground -- behind it lies the Lunar Module and distant lunar hills. Because the world was going to be able to watch the Lunar Module's ascent stage liftoff via the rover's TV camera, this parking place was also known as the VIP Site. In December of 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 75 hours on the Moon, while colleague Ronald Evans orbited overhead. The crew returned with 110 kilograms of rock and soil samples, more than from any of the other lunar landing sites. Cernan and Schmitt are still the last to walk (or drive) on the Moon.

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