Tour of the Moon 4K Redux
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- Visualizations by:
- Ernie Wright
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- Edited by:
- David Ladd
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- Scientific consulting by:
- Noah Petro
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- Produced by:
- David Ladd
- View full credits
The camera flies over the lunar terrain, coming in for close looks at a variety of interesting sites and some of the LRO data associated with them. Includes narration, music, feature titles, research sources, and the location and scale of the image center. Music Provided By Killer Tracks: "Never Looking Back" - Frederick Wiedmann. "Flying over Turmoil" - Benjamin Krause & Scott Goodman.
Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.
In the fall of 2011, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission released its original Tour of the Moon, a five-minute animation that takes the viewer on a virtual tour of our nearest neighbor in space. Six years later, the tour has been recreated in eye-popping 4K resolution, using the same camera path and drawing from the vastly expanded data trove collected by LRO in the intervening years.
The tour visits a number of interesting sites chosen to illustrate a variety of lunar terrain features. Some are on the near side and are familiar to both professional and amateur observers on Earth, while others can only be seen clearly from space. Some are large and old (Orientale, South Pole-Aitken), others are smaller and younger (Tycho, Aristarchus). Constantly shadowed areas near the poles are hard to photograph but easier to measure with altimetry, while several of the Apollo landing sites, all relatively near the equator, have been imaged at resolutions as high as 25 centimeters (10 inches) per pixel.
The new tour highlights the mineral composition of the Aristarchus plateau, evidence for surface water ice in certain spots near the south pole, and the mapping of gravity in and around the Orientale basin.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
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Visualizer
- Ernie Wright (USRA) [Lead]
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Video editor
- David Ladd (Advocates in Manpower Management, Inc.) [Lead]
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Scientist
- Noah Petro (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
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Producer
- David Ladd (Advocates in Manpower Management, Inc.) [Lead]
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Datasets used in this visualization
LRO (Collected with the Diviner sensor)
LRO DEM (A.K.A. Digital Elevation Map) (Collected with the LOLA sensor)
LRO/SELENE SLDEM2015 (A.K.A. DIgital Elevation Model) (Collected with the LOLA/TC sensor)
A digital elevation model of the Moon derived from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter and the SELENE Terrain Camera. See the description in Icarus. The data is here.
See more visualizations using this data setGRAIL GRAIL Free-Air Gravity (A.K.A. Free-Air Gravity) (Collected with the Lunar Gravity Ranging System sensor)
LRO NAC (A.K.A. Narrow Angle Camera) (Collected with the LROC sensor)
LRO WAC 643nm High Sun Global Mosaic (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.