Lunar Topography in Natural Color

  • Released Friday, April 17th, 2009
  • Updated Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023 at 1:54PM
  • ID: 3594

An updated version of this animation is available here.

This animation is a brief tour of several prominent features of the Moon's terrain: Tycho crater, the south pole, and the South Pole-Aitken basin. It is match-moved to a companion piece showing the terrain elevations in false color.

The surface appearance is derived from photographs taken by the Clementine spacecraft. Although it shows the visible surface in natural color, this animation does not depict realistic sunlight and shadows. This is especially significant near the poles, where certain parts of the terrain can be in permanent shadow and would never be fully visible in the manner depicted here.

Moon natural color topo flyover

Tycho crater and its bright ejecta rays are among the youngest and most recognizable features on the Moon. The crater is 85 kilometers (50 miles) wide and 4700 meters (15,400 feet) deep. The central peak is 2400 meters (7900 feet) above the crater floor.

Tycho crater and its bright ejecta rays are among the youngest and most recognizable features on the Moon. The crater is 85 kilometers (50 miles) wide and 4700 meters (15,400 feet) deep. The central peak is 2400 meters (7900 feet) above the crater floor.

The floors of deep craters near the poles, including bowl-shaped Shackleton near the center of this view of the south pole, are in permanent shadow (not shown here) and are therefore cold and dark enough to harbor potential deposits of water ice.

The floors of deep craters near the poles, including bowl-shaped Shackleton near the center of this view of the south pole, are in permanent shadow (not shown here) and are therefore cold and dark enough to harbor potential deposits of water ice.

The South Pole-Aitken basin, the large, dark patch centered in the image, is roughly 2100 kilometers (1300 miles) wide and 10 kilometers (6 miles) deep, perhaps the largest impact feature in the solar system. It lies on the far side of the Moon, the hemisphere never visible from Earth, and was found only after spacecraft began visiting the Moon in the 1960s.

The South Pole-Aitken basin, the large, dark patch centered in the image, is roughly 2100 kilometers (1300 miles) wide and 10 kilometers (6 miles) deep, perhaps the largest impact feature in the solar system. It lies on the far side of the Moon, the hemisphere never visible from Earth, and was found only after spacecraft began visiting the Moon in the 1960s.

For More Information

See http://www.nasa.gov/lro

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. Some elevation data provided by JAXA/SELENE.

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series:

Tapes

This visualization originally appeared on the following tapes:
  • LRO Pre-Launch Resource Tape (ID: 2009030)
    Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 4:00AM
    Produced by - Andy Acuna

Datasets used in this visualization

KAGUYA DEM (Collected with the Laser Altimeter (LALT) sensor)
JAXA 2007-12-30 to 2008-03-31

Formerly known as "SELENE".

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Tycho DEM

Margot et al.

Dataset can be found at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=00841991

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ULCN 2005 (A.K.A. Unified Lunar Control Network 2005)
Data Compilation USGS 1970 to 2005

The ULCN 2005 (Unified Lunar Control Network 2005) is a lunar control point network that precisely measured 272,931 pieces of data produced by the USGS using existing lunar imagery or data from the Clementine and other observations.

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