June 18 will mark the 5-year anniversary of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission to survey the Moon. And to celebrate, NASA will release a special image collection called “The Moon as Art.” The space agency wants you to pick the cover image from five candidate pictures. Voting has begun, and it closes June 6. So what are you waiting for? Vote for your favorite image now. NASA will announce the winning cover photo June 18, when it releases the full collection.
Caption: For the 5-year anniversary of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, NASA wants you to pick the mission's best image, which will be the cover of a photo collection. // NASA image
If you’d also like a little background on LRO, it launched June 18, 2009, from Florida and entered orbit around the Moon June 23. Since then, it has captured tens of thousands of photographs of our planet’s only natural satellite. Those pictures show detail as small as 6.5 feet (2 meters) wide.
Scientists have also stitched together 10,581 images to create the largest high-resolution mosaic of the lunar north pole. (If you’re interested in exploring the mosaic, you can find it here.)