June 22, 2013

Happy Anniversary

image by Chuck Wood

Recognize this? Probably not, because it hasn't been released yet. In March at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference
the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team tacked up on the wall a number of photographic prints of spectacular LRO
images. This is a full Moon illumination for nearly the entire lunar globe. My iPhone snapshot fails to do it justice - it is a WAC
mosaic similar to the one used for the LRO QuickMap, except this is for high Sun. It is like the Clementine mosaic except with
better resolution (100 m, I presume) and better depiction of tonal gradations. I hope that this mosaic will show up some day as
a layer option on the QuickMap. And I hope that there will be more global mosaics, perhaps a low Sun mosaic and ultimately
one showing a multispectral Moon to replace the old Clementine one that provides compositional information. LRO has been in
orbit 4 years today and I bet there will be many more surprises to come.

Chuck Wood

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