My name's Tawny, and I am one of the ASU undergraduate student workers at LROC. One of the many fun tasks I get to do is to produce Digital Elevation Models (DEM) of the lunar surface by using specialized hardware and software to extract elevation data on the Moon from stereo images. A DEM is like a digital version of an old-fashioned contour map and essentially provides the elevation of the surface for each pixel. For a pair of images to be stereo, it must show the same location on the Moon taken with different illumination conditions. Or, to put it another way, the relative angles of the Sun, the lunar surface, and the spacecraft have to be different for each picture while showing the same region.

This week we launched our brand new Operations Journal where we will chronicle the activities and accomplishments of our student workers, staff and scientists.

To kick off the launch of this journal, I'd like to offer up the first post in order to talk about its motivation and goals we hope to achieve...

My name is Andrew, and I am currently an undergraduate Industrial, Systems and Operations Engineering student at Arizona State University, where LROC operations are based. At LROC, I am currently employed as the web developer.  This means I am the person who is primarily responsible for maintaining, developing and making updates and additions to the LROC website (as well as other websites for associated projects).

I would like to be the first to welcome you to our new LROC Operations Journal

So what is this journal all about?

This journal will receive regular postings from the LROC team. What do we do? How do we know what to image and when? What do we do with the images once they are on the ground? What is housekeeping data? And many other topics.

Share in the adventure as LRO leads the way towards returning humans to deep space!

LRO is now in nadir pointing mode (looking straight down at the Moon). Another key milestone on the path to instrument activation.

The LRO OPS Team successfully commanded a 231 second burn this morning that placed LRO into its 30 km x 199 km (19 mile x 124 mile) commissioning phase orbit.

This morning the LRO Team at Goddard Space Flight Center commanded LRO to execute a 40-minute burn that placed LRO into lunar orbit!

LRO, carrying the LROC and LCROSS instruments was successfully launched at 5:32 U.S. Eastern. Congratulations!