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Illustration of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera in orbit.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is led by principal investigator and professor Mark Robinson and his team in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration.

The orbiter, which launched in 2009, is a robotic spacecraft orbiting the Moon at an altitude of 50-200 km. LRO's primary objective is to make fundamental scientific discoveries about the Moon.

LROC is a system of three cameras mounted on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that capture high resolution black and white images and moderate resolution multi-spectral images of the lunar surface. The system consists of two Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs) and a Wide Angle Camera (WAC). LROC is one of seven instruments on board LRO. 

ShadowCam, led by principal investigator and professor Mark Robinson and his team at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, is a focused investigation of the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), or regions near the lunar poles that never receive direct sunlight and can become cold traps for volatiles like water ice. The ShadowCam Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) is a high-heritage instrument based on the successful Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). 

ShadowCam is scheduled to launch on board the Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) in 2022 as an international collaboration between NASA and Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI).


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