People may not be hopping around on the Moon as they were a generation ago, but there are images of the lunar surface that are much more precise than what we could see back then. The following image was taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as the spacecraft took a 70 degree roll to the side to catch the Moon’s topographic features from a side view instead of the top-down perspective we’re used to seeing.
What you see here is the inside of the Cabeus Crater, the place on the Moon where a satellite from Earth slammed into the surface about a month ago, revealing the existence of water frozen as ice in portions of the crater that are permanently in shadow. In this view of the crater, we’re seeing inside the larger crater, which fills up the entire screen, with smaller craters inside. The bottom foreground portion of the photograph is estimated to be 15 kilometers wide.
