Taking A SMART Sidelong Look At Lunar Peak Of Eternal Light

Tag : light

Images taken by the AMIE camera carried by ESA’s SMART-1mission have been used to create digital elevation model of thepeak, which is almost continuously exposed to sunlight.
“AMIE is not a stereo camera, so producing a 3-D model of thesurface has been a challenge,” said Dr Koschny.“We’ve used a technique where we use the brightness ofreflected light to determine the slope and, by comparing severalimages, put together a model that produces a shadow pattern thatmatches those observed by SMART-1.”
AMIE took a total of 113 images of the peak, located close to therim of the Shackleton Crater which lies on the lunar south pole. Inall but four of the images, the peak was illuminated by sunlight.This is of particular interest in planning future manned missionsto the Moon, as it would mean that solar panels could be usedalmost constantly to generate an electricity supply for a lunarbase.
In addition, the shadowed craters nearby are in constant darknessand may hold water ice deposited over millennia by cometary impactsand hydrogen and oxygen particles contained in the solar wind. Thispotential water supply would also be a vital resource for any lunarbase.
The team, led by Dr Björn Grieger of ESA’s EuropeanSpace Astronomy Centre in Madrid, selected five of the AMIE imagesshowing the peak illuminated from different angles. They mapped allthe pixels onto a grid, defining the bright and dark areas. Thedata from the five images were then compared to produce estimatesof the slope angles and the rendered elevation model wasiteratively adjusted to produce a shadow match. The original AMIEimages were then projected onto the retrieved model. To clearlyvisualise the topography, the elevation has been exaggerated fivetimes.
SMART-1 orbited the Moon between November 2004 and September 2006,covering a full seasonal cycle.