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Hautaluoma 202-358-0668 Image
advisory: 2009-099 June
18, 2009 NASA Scientists
Bring Light to Moon's Permanently Dark Craters PASADENA,
Calif. -- A new lunar topography map with the highest resolution of the moon's
rugged south polar region provides new information on some of our natural
satellite's darkest inhabitants -- permanently shadowed craters. The
map was created by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif., who collected the data using the Deep Space Network's Goldstone Solar
System Radar located in California's Mojave Desert. The map will help Lunar
Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission planners as they
target for an encounter with a permanently dark crater near the lunar South
Pole. "Since
the beginning of time, these lunar craters have been invisible to humanity,"
said Barbara Wilson, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Calif., and manager of the study. "Now we can see detailed
topography inside these craters down to 40 meters [132 feet] per pixel, with
height accuracy of better than 5 meters [16 feet]." The
terrain map of the moon's south pole is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/moon-20090618.html . Scientists
targeted the moon's south polar region using Goldstone's 70-meter (230-foot)
radar dish. The antenna, three-quarters the size of a football field, sent a
500-kilowatt-strong, 90-minute-long radar stream 373,046 kilometers (231,800
miles) to the moon. Signals were reflected back from the rough-hewn lunar
terrain and detected by two of Goldstone's 34-meter (112-foot) antennas on
Earth. The roundtrip time, from the antenna to the moon and back, was about
two-and-a-half seconds. The
scientists compared their data with laser altimeter data recently released by
the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kaguya mission to position and
orient the radar images and maps. The
new map provides contiguous topographic detail over a region approximately 500
kilometers (311 miles) by 400 kilometers (249 miles). Funding
for the program was provided by NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate.
JPL manages the Goldstone Solar System Radar and the Deep Space Network for
NASA. JPL is managed for NASA by the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. More
information about the Goldstone Solar System Radar and Deep Space Network is at
http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn . More information about NASA's exploration
program to return humans to the moon is at http://www.nasa.gov/exploration . -end-
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