The Moon's South Pole in 3D via LRO/LOLA First Light Data [1080p]

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) was launched on June 18, 2009. Its mission is to map the moon's surface, find safe landing sites, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment, and demonstrate new technology. One of the instruments on board is the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) which measures landing site slopes, lunar surface roughness, and has begun generation of a high resolution 3D map of the Moon. The animation depicted here is the beginning of LOLA's mapping project and shows the lunar south pole through digital elevation map data collected by the LOLA instrument during the spacecraft commissioning phase. During the commissioning phase, LRO was in a highly elliptical orbit coming closer to the lunar south pole than the north pole. Furthermore, since LOLA uses laser pulses to measure the surface, the accuracy of its measurements are greatly affected by the instrument's distance to the surface. This is why there is virtually no data of the lunar north pole, and much better coverage of the south pole.
The topographic data shown here is currently processed to show at approximately 30 meters per pixel.

The colors in this animation depict the relative heights of the lunar surface with respect to the surface mean. Warm colors (brown, red, magenta, and tan) indicate areas above the mean. Cooler colors (green, cyan, blue, and violet) are areas below the mean.

credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

source: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?3633

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Moon
• LRO
• LOLA
• lunar south pole
• lunar north pole
• NASA
• space exploration
• astronomy

[djxatlanta]

@Rob260259 - you can thank NASA... the video and text credits belong to them! =)

[Rob260259]

Nice video, good animation and excellent explanation.