Camera on NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Survived 2014 Meteoroid Hit
NASA said:On Oct.13, 2014 something very strange happened to the camera aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), which normally produces beautifully clear images of the lunar surface, produced an image that was wild and jittery. From the sudden and jagged pattern apparent in the image, the LROC team determined that the camera must have been hit by a tiny meteoroid, a small natural object in space.
LROC is a system of three cameras mounted on the LRO spacecraft. Two Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs) capture high resolution black and white images. The third Wide Angle Camera captures moderate resolution images using filters to provide information about the properties and color of the lunar surface.
The NAC works by building an image one line at a time. The first line is captured, then the orbit of the spacecraft moves the camera relative to the surface, and then the next line is captured, and so on, as thousands of lines are compiled into a full image.
According to Mark Robinson, professor and principal investigator of LROC at ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, the jittery appearance of the image captured is the result of a sudden and extreme cross-track oscillation of the camera. LROC researchers concluded that there must have been a brief violent movement of the left Narrow Angle Camera.
There were no spacecraft events like solar panel movements or antenna tracking that might have caused spacecraft jitter during this period. “Even if there had been, the resulting jitter would have affected both cameras identically,” says Robinson. “The only logical explanation is that the NAC was hit by a meteoroid."
During LROC’s development, a detailed computer model was made to insure the NAC would not fail during the severe vibrations caused by the launch of the spacecraft. The computer model was tested before launch by attaching the NAC to a vibration table that simulated launch. The camera passed the test with flying colors, proving its stability.
Using this detailed computer model, the LROC team ran simulations to see if they could reproduce the distortions seen on the Oct. 13 image and determine the size of the meteoroid that hit the camera. They estimate the impacting meteoroid would have been about half the size of a pinhead (0.8 millimeter), assuming a velocity of about 4.3 miles (7 kilometers) per second and a density of an ordinary chondrite meteorite (2.7 grams/cm3).
“The meteoroid was traveling much faster than a speeding bullet,” says Robinson. “In this case, LROC did not dodge a speeding bullet, but rather survived a speeding bullet!”
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