NASA: Moon mapped as never before

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GREENBELT, Md., June 21 (UPI) -- NASA says data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have forever changed humans' view of the moon, showing the whole orb in unprecedented detail.

The LRO's seven onboard instruments have delivered more than 192 terabytes of data, images and maps, the equivalent of nearly 41,000 typical DVDs, a NASA release said Tuesday.

"This is a tremendous accomplishment," Douglas Cooke of the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington, said. "The exploration phase of the mission delivered a lot more than it originally promised, and that's been just the beginning for LRO."

One LRO instrument, the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, has yielded more than 4 billion measurements to create the most precise and complete topographic maps to date of the moon's complex, heavily cratered landscape , NASA said.

LOLA has taken more than 100 times more measurements than all previous lunar instruments of its kind combined, NASA said, opening up a world of possibilities for future exploration.

"Before LRO, we actually knew the shape of Mars better than we knew the shape of the moon, our nearest neighbor," John Keller of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said. "But because of LRO and LOLA, we now have detailed maps of both the near side and far side of the moon."