Chinese New Moon Atlas is the Most Detailed So Far
einar writes:
Existing maps of the moon date back to the 1960s and 1970s. The new "Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globe" took a decade in the making and is the work of over a hundred scientists. It depicts the moon in a scale of 1:2'500'000 which is twice as detailed compared to maps from the Apollo era. The maps are supposed to help future space missions. They are available in Chinese and English. A digital version for the scientific community is in the making
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has released the highest-resolution geological maps of the Moon yet. The Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globe, which took more than 100 researchers over a decade to compile, reveals a total of 12,341 craters, 81 basins and 17 rock types, along with other basic geological information about the lunar surface. The maps were made at the unprecedented scale of 1:2,500,000.
"Every question in geology starts with looking at a geological map," says Ross Mitchell, a geophysicist at the CAS Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing. The new lunar atlas is "really a resource for the whole world", he says.
The CAS also released a book called Map Quadrangles of the Geologic Atlas of the Moon, comprising 30 sector diagrams which together form a visualization of the whole Moon.
[...] With the updated atlas, scientists will be able to better understand the history of the Moon, evaluate potential lunar resources and conduct comparative geological studies. It will also inform the location choices of future missions, including where to build a lunar research base, Liu says.
[...] Liu says that his team has already started work to improve the resolution of the maps, and will produce regional maps of higher accuracy on the basis of scientific and engineering needs. In the meantime, the completed atlas has been integrated into a cloud platform called the Digital Moon, and will eventually become available to the international research community.
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