NHK of Japan and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said they succeeded in capturing the world’s first close-up HD images taken by a lunar explorer (the “Kaguya”), which was situated in lunar orbit 100 km (roughly 61 miles) above the surface of the moon.
Lunar imaging was performed twice on Oct. 31. According to the JAXA, both Hi-Vision captures were “eight-fold speed intermittent shooting” (where eight minutes, in effect, is converged into one minute). The first shooting covered the northern area of the Oceanus Procellarum toward the center of the moon’s North Pole; the second image-taking was from south-to-north on the western side of the Procellarum.
The moving-image data was received by JAXA’s Usuda Deep Space Center and then processed by NHK. Some of the original HD content (although offered online in SD) can be viewed on the JAXA Web site.
