Lunar South Pole Terrain in Coded Color

  • Released Saturday, July 22, 2023
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The camera flies toward and then around the Moon's South Pole as the natural surface color changes to colors that encode elevation. Thirty features at the South Pole are identified.

Three months after the launch of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on June 18, 2009, the mission released its first batch of elevation measurements of the area around the lunar south pole. Fourteen years, 60,000 orbits, and over 10 billion laser shots later, LRO's picture of the south pole landscape has filled in nicely. LRO's detailed terrain maps will be vital for both human and robotic explorers scheduled to arrive at south pole locations in the coming years.

An image of the Moon's South Pole colored by elevation, with labels for 29 craters and the recently named Mons Mouton.

An image of the Moon's South Pole colored by elevation, with labels for 29 craters and the recently named Mons Mouton.

The colors used to show elevation at the South Pole of the Moon.

The colors used to show elevation at the South Pole of the Moon.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

This page was originally published on Saturday, July 22, 2023.
This page was last updated on Thursday, February 22, 2024 at 12:16 AM EST.

Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series:

Datasets used in this visualization

  • DEM (Digital Elevation Map) [LRO: LOLA]

    ID: 653
    Sensor: LOLA
    See all pages that use this dataset

  • SLDEM2015 (DIgital Elevation Model) [LRO/SELENE: LOLA/TC]

    ID: 948
    Type: Model Sensor: LOLA/TC

    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 all pages that use this dataset

  • LROC WAC Color Mosaic (Natural Color Hapke Normalized WAC Mosaic) [Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter: LRO Camera]

    ID: 1015
    Type: Mosaic Sensor: LRO Camera

    This natural-color global mosaic is based on the 'Hapke normalized' mosaic from LRO's wide-angle camera. The data has been gamma corrected, white balanced, and range adjusted to more closely match human vision.

    See all pages that use this dataset

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.