Date: 31 Aug 2006
Satellite: SMART-1
Depicts: Roughly 1800 km long strip of the lunar near side
Copyright: ESA/SPACE-X (Space Exploration Institute)

This mosaic is composed of a set of images obtained by AMIE on board SMART-1 on 19 August 2006, some two weeks before the nominal impact date. The strip is ~1800 kilometres long and runs from (69° W, 11° N) at the top left, down to (41° W, 56° S) at the bottom right of the mosaic. The imaged area includes the region where SMART-1 is scheduled to impact the lunar surface.

The impact region lies about two thirds down, directly above the small gap in this mosaic, just south-east of the small crater Palmieri A (the small dark crater directly above the gap on the left). A close-up of this region with the nominal impact point indicated is available under the related images.

The images were taken during two successive orbits (2820 & 2821) at an altitude between 900 km (bottom of the mosaic) and 3000 km (top of the image), resulting in two adjacent strips. The sequences were taken after SMART-1 had passed over the lunar south pole and was on the outward leg of its orbit towards apolune, therefore the images run sequentially from south to north.

The projection of the mosaic is in cylindrical coordinates, with North up. On 19 August, when the images were taken, the spacecraft was not flying directly over the site and the camera observed the lunar surface under an angle, resulting in the curvature of the mosaic.

An annotated version of this image is under the related images on the right-hand side.