Happy Valentine's Day! Here's more
#NASALove -- We're always over the moon for you with our Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft. Earlier this month, LADEE successfully downlinked images of the moon and stars taken by onboard camera systems, known as star trackers. This is the first time the LADEE team commanded the spacecraft to send these pictures back to Earth.
The main job of a star tracker is to snap images of the surrounding star field so that the spacecraft can internally calculate its orientation in space. It completes this task many times per minute. The accuracy of each of LADEE's instruments' measurements depends on the star tracker calculating the precise orientation of the spacecraft. Given the critical nature of its assignment, a star tracker doesn't use ordinary cameras. Star trackers' lenses have a wide-angle field of view in order to capture the night sky in a single frame.
The images shown here were acquired on Feb. 8, 2014, around 23:45 U...