Danuri: Korea's first lunar orbiter Options

[threadworm]

They have now added several more month's worth of LUTI and Shadowcam images.

As they seem to be pretty good at labelling the instrument target, the best method I've found of interrogating the LUTI files is to get a mass downloader extension (simple mass downloader works well) and grab all the .xml files for a given month. Once you have them you can then use Windows Explorer to search inside the files for (eg) Apollo. It's worth checking both A and B versions of the images.

Often the target label might be near and not actually show it, but it does at least reduce the amount of downloading you need to do. If they've got round to actually calibrating the raw images, the xml will show the lat/long of the observation.

So far LUTI has images of Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15 and 17. South Ray crater is captured nicelty at Apollo 16's site, but just misses the lunar module.

Shadowcam has Apollo 14, 15 and 16. They have shadowcam observation of Apollo 11 and 12, but there is insufficient ground disturbance there for them to register in the images.

[Phil Stooke]

It's interesting to get into these images! This LPSC abstract is a look at the LCROSS impact in Cabeus:

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2024/pdf/1913.pdf

Here is a Shadowcam look at a 700 m diameter crater near the LCROSS impact site.



The Shepherding Satellite (which monitored the LCROSS Centaur impact) is supposed to have struck the surface just outside this crater at about the 2:00 position outside its rim, roughly where there is a small bright spot on the rim of another crater.

Phil

[threadworm]

Another addition to the LUTI archive for July 2023. Hopefully more to follow.

A nice shot of Apollo in there

[Phil Stooke]

Yes. It's Apollo 14. Here is a version with the striping removed.



Phil

[threadworm]

Totally omitted '14' when typing - no idea why! That version I posted was based on processing their .img format raw image. Their own .png version is hard to improve on and doesn't have the banding!

The July 2023 .xml files also identify files as having Apollo 16 & 17 LMs, but they are some distance out.

[threadworm]

August 2023 files now being added, but may possibly have stalled for the weekend.

Two great shots of Apollo 15.

There's also an interesting oblique view of Hadley rille, would be great if the matching image from camera B covers Apollo 15 as well.

[threadworm]

This is the oblique Camera A view.

[Phil Stooke]

The Shadowcam images take a bit of getting used to, having enormous variations in illumination from place to place. I have been working on the LCROSS site, so here are two sets of maps illustrating what could be done before Shadowcam and with it.

First, this set of maps zooms in on the impact area inside Cabeus. The first map is just LOLA shaded relief. The second map is LOLA with a bit of detail from Mini-RF, and the third map is mostly Mini-RF. The final sections (D and E) use radar images made at Goldstone. Mini-RF found a small bright spot in post-impact images at the location predicted for the LCROSS Centaur impact. The Goldstone image marginally resolved features suggestive of the Centaur and Shepherding Spacecraft (SSC) impact sites.



(MIni-RF paper: Neish, C. D., D. B. J. Bussey, P. Spudis, W. Marshall, B. J. Thomson, G. W. Patterson, and L. M. Carter (2011), The nature of lunar volatiles as revealed by Mini‐RF observations of the LCROSS impact site, J. Geophys. Res., 116, E01005, doi:10.1029/2010JE003647)

I have also added something from a paper by Dagar et al., who used OHRC images from Chandrayaan 2 to look at this site. They don't report seeing the impact sites but they identified bright pixels in places around the impact sites which they interpreted as spacecraft debris. I am not convinced, I think they are probably seeing rocks.

(OHRC paper: Dagar et al., 2023. Analysis of the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus crater in lunar south pole using orbiter high resolution camera imagery. Icarus, 406, p.115762. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2023.115762)

That was the best we could do before Shadowcam, but now we come to Shadowcam data. This set of maps starts with the same Mini-RF image as map C in the previous image. The second image is Shadowcam data for exactly the same area. The third image zooms in and two insets highlight the two impact sites. The Centaur site is the one identified in the LPSC abstract I linked to in an earlier post. The SSC object is just a bright spot in the image, possible from the impact crater, or a bit of the SSC itself or just a rock. It's not a very strong match but it is in the right place.





Phil

[threadworm]

Raw images for August 2023 are now complete, Calibrated images will follow soon. Meanwhile, here's the Apollo 15 LM in the oblique shot I posted above, and two shots of Apollo 12's LM! No processing done on these.