NASA Scientists Bring Light to Moon's Permanently Dark Craters

DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Grey Hautaluoma 202-358-0668
Headquarters, Washington
grey.hautaluoma-1@nasa.gov
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 .

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