NASA’sLunar Reconnaissance Orbiter(LRO ) was launched in the summertime of 2009 . Over the next four years , it took over 10,500 high-pitched - resolving images of the Lunar North Pole . Though it is n’t the first time that region has been imaged , it is the first time it has been done at such a high resoluteness . In 2011 , LROC secrete a different icon of the same sphere of the moon , with each picture element cover 100 meters . Thisnewly - released imagehas 50x the resolution !
The images were assemble into one of the largest mosaics available on the internet . How orotund is it ? Each pixel covers 2 meters of the lunar surface . With a aggregate of 681 billion picture element , the portion of moon that has been mapped would cover about a quarter of the United States :
The figure pick up by produce “ dog collar mosaics ” by imaging the same latitude every two hours for a month . The lunation ’s rotation bring new brightness level to some of these areas and reserve the clearest images to be used . Each neckband spans 1 - 3 degrees of latitude and altogether , the photomosaic cover from the North Pole ( 90˚N ) all the elbow room down to 60˚N.
The information obtained from these images will help NASA ’s scientists plan future missions . They will be able to determine possible landing sites and areas of interest for further study .
If the mosaic were printed out at 300 dpi , the resulting characterization would insure an intact football orbit !
download the entire mosaic — even as a compressed JPEG single file — would take about a tebibyte of space on your tough drive , so it ’s belike just prosperous to take in it online in itsinteractive formatting .
All images credit to : NASA / GSFC / Arizona State University
