NASA spacecraft around the moon photographs the crash site of a Japanese company's lunar lander
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A NASA spacecraft around the moon has photographed the crash site of a Japanese company's lunar lander.
NASA released the pictures Friday, two weeks after ispace's lander slammed into the moon.
The images show a dark smudge where the lander, named Resilience, and its mini rover crashed into Mare Frigoris or Sea of Cold, a volcanic region in the moon's far north. A faint halo around the area was formed by the lunar dirt kicked up by the impact.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the scene last week.
The crash was the second failure in two years for Tokyo-based ispace. Company officials plan to hold a news conference next week to explain what doomed the latest mission, launched from Cape Canaveral in January.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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'By using computer simulations of what such a shower of particles would look like if it had behaved like the ANITA anomalous events, they are able to generate a kind of template for similar events and then search their data to see if anything like that appears.' Gorham, who was not involved with the new research, designed the ANITA experiment and has conducted other research to understand more about the anomalous signals. While the Auger Observatory was designed to measure downward-going particle showers produced in the atmosphere by ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, the team redesigned their data analysis to search for upward-going air showers, Vandenbroucke said. Vandenbroucke did not work on the new study, but he peer-reviewed it prior to publication. 'Auger has an enormous collecting area for such events, larger than ANITA,' he said. 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