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Title : MSSS Completes Hi-Res Clementine Maps
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Date :

Washington - July 25, 1999 - Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) of San
Diego, CA, has completed a set of high-resolution digital maps of the Moon
produced from images taken by the US Department of Defense and NASA
Clementine Mission in 1994. These maps, which were assembled from several
hundred thousand separate Clementine High Resolution (HiRes) camera images,
have been delivered to NASA for distribution through the Planetary Data
System.
The production of the Clementine HiRes maps used machine vision software,
developed by MSSS, that automatically located and correlated the vast
majority of the images.

This dataset, which fills 22 CD-ROMs, provides a factor of five improvement
in the detail that can be seen over significant sections of the lunar
surface, and includes nearly complete coverage of the polar regions. It is an
exciting new tool for lunar geology, and provides a context for interpreting
other datasets such as the recent polar ice results from the Lunar Prospector
Mission.

"We completely broke the paradigm of manual mosaicking as it has been done on
past planetary image datasets," said Jeff Warren, MSSS lead on the Clementine
HiRes Map effort. "It would have been impossible to mosaic these two hundred
thousand images manually on anything approaching the timescale or cost we
achieved with Clementine."

The Clementine HiRes maps were produced by spatially registering each HiRes
image to the photometrically-calibrated United States Geological Survey
(USGS) digital basemaps issued in 1997.

The USGS maps cover the entire Moon at a resolution of 100 to 150 meters per
pixel using images from Clementine's Ultraviolet/Visible camera. A total of
187,526 raw HiRes images were used in these mosaics: 86% for the sub-polar
mosaics and 14% for the polar mosaics.

Nearly twice this number of HiRes images were excluded from the maps because
of poor exposure or camera pointing. The HiRes maps cover about 8% of the
lunar surface at 20 to 30 meters per pixel resolution, which is five times
higher resolution than the USGS basemap.

The HiRes map coverage near the poles is extensive. The colors depict data
from the Lunar Prospector Mission neutron spectrometer. Colors indicates low
neutron counts, interpreted to be locations of ice - lavender signifies some
lowering of neutrons, blue the least neutrons.

The bulk of the CD-ROMS (18) covers the sub-polar regions below 80 degrees
latitude at a scale of 20 meters/pixel in the sinusoidal map projection. The
remaining 4 CDs cover the north and south poles with 30 meter/pixel scale in
the stereographic map projection. Two CDs are devoted to each pole, one
representing images acquired when the spacecraft was closest to the moon's
south pole, and the other when the spacecraft was closer to the north pole.

The MSSS Clementine HiRes maps will be available on-line and on CD-ROM from
the NASA Planetary Data System in the third quarter of 1999. Until then, the
South Polar disk CL_6021 is available on the MSSS site.

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