Shackleton's Rim Through the Eyes of LRO/LROC
- Visualizations by:
- Alex Kekesi
- View full credits
This animation zooms into the LRO/LROC NAC swath of Shackleton crater's rim and slowly pans across the rim's surface.
Last year, Japan's Selene and India's Chandrayaan spacecraft gave us our first high resolution look at the lunar south pole, which includes Shackleton crater. For its size, Shackleton has an exceptionally deep and rugged interior. Usually craters fill in with time as their walls slump and material from afar is thrown in by distant impacts. Much of Shackleton's rim appears rounded and is peppered with smaller craters, indications of a relatively ancient age. Right now it is not clear if Shackleton crater is relatively old or young. This NAC image reveals a shelf on the southeast flank of the crater that is more than two kilometers across and perfectly suitable for a future landing. The extreme Sun angle exaggerates the apparent roughness, however if you look closely at this scale any area that is between small craters could be good candidates for a potential landing site.

This is the original LROC swath used to create this animation.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Data provided by Arizona State University
Animator
- Alex Kekesi (GST) [Lead]
Writers
- Alex Kekesi (GST)
- Andrew Freeberg (NASA/GSFC)
Scientist
- Mark Robinson (Arizona State University)
Producer
- Andrew Freeberg (NASA/GSFC)
Project support
- Eduardo Valente (GST)
- James W. Williams (GST)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Datasets used in this visualization
LRO NAC (A.K.A. Narrow Angle Camera) (Collected with the LROC sensor)
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.