Lunar 100 virtual moon atlas code#

These include not just the Apollo landing sites with the landers, flags, instruments and other objects but also the Surveyor landers and even all the Soviet Luna missions.īesides the primary visual elements, many other features were needed to make Lunar Explorer a satisfying user experience.

All successful soft landing sites have been replicated.

The starfield is accurately displayed showing all familiar constellations as well as the Milky Way band of stars.

The Sun can be moved by the user around the Earth-Moon system to create all Moon phases and Lunar sunrises and sunsets.

The rotating Earth is positioned high in the Lunar sky almost directly overhead when standing at the center of the near face.

It covers the entire Lunar surface all 38 million square kilometers!

The topographical data or Digital Elevation Map (DEM) was derived from processing stereographic pairs of photos taken by the Clementine mission.

Lunar Explorer consists of five primary visual elements: NASA generated lunar surface topography the Earth the Sun a star field of familiar constellations and the equipment from the successful landed Lunar missions. It’s hard to impress Burt Rutan but I think we pulled it off. Burt Rutan using the Lunar Explorer simulation in its fully immersive Virtual Reality configuration. Jinhai Zhang and Yangting Lin, professors at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, contributed to this research.Burt Rutan walks on the Moon.

Lunar 100 virtual moon atlas code#

“Here at Penn State, we already made this workflow as an open-source code for colleagues.” “I would say we used traditional data processing techniques, but we looked at the data with more care and designed its suitable workflow for such lunar data because this is a very different environment than Earth,” Zhu said.

His team is now working with machine learning technology to further improve the findings.

Zhu said the data processing tools may have use for interpreting similar data collected during future missions to the moon, Mars or elsewhere in the solar system. The results may indicate higher meteoric activity in the solar system during this period billions of years ago, according to the team, who recently reported their findings in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “We discovered this polarity change in the data and created a detailed geophysical image of the subsurface up to a few hundred meters depth.” “Our paper is really providing the first geophysical evidence to see this electromagnetic permittivity changed from a small value for the paleoregolith to a large value for the lava flows,” Zhu said. The scientists observed changes in polarity as the electromagnetic pulses traveled down through the dense lava rock and the paleoregolith, allowing the team to distinguish between the different layers.

Zhu said his team developed a four-step data processing flow to enhance the signal and suppress noise in the data. Previous studies have examined the dataset, created when the Yutu rover sent electromagnetic pulses into the lunar underground and listened as they echoed back. This is the very unique contribution of this work.” “Our findings provide a constraint on what happened between two and three billion years ago. “Lunar scientists count craters on the moon and use computer models to determine the rate that regolith is produced,” Zhu said. Over time, the rock breaks down into dust and soil, called regolith, with repeated asteroid impacts and space weathering, only to be buried by subsequent lava flows, the scientists said. The moon has experienced volcanic activity throughout its history, depositing lava rock on the surface. The findings suggest the paleoregolith formed much faster than previous estimates of 6.5 feet per billion years, the scientists said. The researchers identified a thick layer of paleoregolith, roughly 16 to 30 feet, sandwiched between two layers of lava rock believed to be 2.3 and 3.6 billion years old. The team, led by Zhu, conducted new analysis of radar data collected by China’s Chang’e 3 mission in 2013, which performed the first direct ground radar measurements on the moon. “These layers have been undisturbed since their formation and could be important records for determining early asteroid impact and volcanic history of the moon.” “Using careful data processing, we found interesting new evidence that this buried layer, called paleoregolith, may be much thicker than previously expected,” said Tieyuan Zhu, assistant professor of geophysics at Penn State. An ancient layer of this material, covered by periodic lava flows and now buried under the lunar surface, could provide new insight into the Moon’s deep past, according to a team of scientists. The dusty surface of the moon - immortalized in images of Apollo astronauts’ lunar footprints - formed as the result of asteroid impacts and the harsh environment of space breaking down rock over millions of years.