India's Chandrayaan 2 is Creating the Highest-Resolution Map We Have of the Moon
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:
India's Chandrayaan 2 is creating the highest-resolution map we have of the moon:
India's space organization, ISRO, launched Chandrayaan 2 to the moon last year in July. While its lander Vikram crashed on the lunar surface on September 7, the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter continues to orbit the moon.
The Chandrayaan 2 orbiter hosts an extensive set of instruments to map the moon, and now, we get a peek at the data it has sent.
ISRO scientists had submitted a raft of initial results from the orbiter's mapping instruments to present at the flagship 51st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March. This is an annual conference hosted in the United States where more than 2000 planetary scientists and students from around the world attend and present their latest work. However, due to concerns about the novel coronavirus, the conference has been canceled.
[...] The Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC 2) onboard Chandrayaan 2 is a stereo imager, meaning it can capture 3-D images. It does that by imaging the same site from three different angles, akin to NASA's LRO, from which a 3-D image is constructed.
TMC 2 has beamed back images taken from 100 km above the lunar surface and the 3-D views generated from them look great. Here is one of a crater and a wrinkled ridge, the latter being a tectonic feature.
Such images are very useful for understanding how lunar features form and get their shape. For example, a 3-D image can help construct an accurate picture of the geometry of the impact that formed a crater.
Over time, Chandrayaan 2 will provide the highest resolution 3-D images of the entire moon, the best case resolution being 5 meters/pixel.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.