Moon Dents - Moon Crater Database V1 Robbins

Moon Crater Database v1 Robbins
Product Information:

The Lunar Crater Database contains approximately 1.3 million lunar impact craters and is approximately complete for all craters larger than about 1–2 km in diameter (Robbins, 2018). Craters were manually identified and measured on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Camera (LROC) Wide-Angle Camera (WAC) images, in LRO Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) topography, SELENE Kaguya Terrain Camera (TC) images, and a merged LOLA+TC DTM (Barker, 2016).

This archive uses PDS4 archiving standards. An overview of PDS4 is provided in the PDS4 Concepts document (2018) and the standards are specified in the PDS4 Standards Reference (2018).

Mission and Instrument Information:

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft to the Moon in June 2009 (Tooley et al., 2010) carrying a variety of instruments including the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA), which continues to return high-resolution images of the lunar surface from its eccentric polar mapping orbit (Petro et al., 2019). The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) is a system of three cameras mounted on the LRO that capture high resolution black and white images and moderate resolution multi-spectral images of the lunar surface.

The LROC consists of two narrow-angle cameras (NACs) that provide 0.5 meter-scale panchromatic images over a 5 km swath , a wide-angle camera (WAC) to provide images at a scale of 100 meters/pixel in seven color bands over a 60 km swath, and a Sequence and Compressor System (SCS) supporting data acquisition for both cameras. The LROC data sets are produced by the LROC Team at the Tempe campus of Arizona State University. The LROC data sets are produced by the LROC Team at the Tempe campus of Arizona State University.

The LOLA has collected over more than 6.5 billion measurements of global surface height with a vertical precision of ~10 cm and an accuracy of ~1m (Mazarico et al., 2013). With such highly accurate global coverage, the resulting topographic map has become the reference geodetic framework for the lunar community and has led to the highest resolution and most accurate polar digital elevation models (DEMs) to date.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched the SELENE Kaguya spacecraft to the Moon in September 2007. The mission concluded June 10, 2009 when the spacecraft was intentionally crashed onto the lunar surface. Subsequent data collection and mapping efforts resulted in “the largest lunar exploration project since the Apollo program” (Haruyama et al., 2008).

The high-performance optical Terrain Camera (TC), a 10-meter spatial resolution stereo-camera, was part of the Lunar Imager/Spectrometer (LISM) instrument suite (Kato et al., 2006), along with the Multi-band Imager (MI, 20 m; (Ohtake et al., 2008) and Spectral Profiler (SP; Matsunaga et al., 2008). Mission objectives for the TC included production of global, high-resolution, high-contrast mosaicked maps (tiles) of the Moon (e.g., Kato et al., 2006; Haruyama et al., 2008).