NASA announced on Tuesday that scientists have created the biggest high-resolution mosaic of the north polar region of the Moon.
The mosaic was put together with 10,581 pictures, and web viewers can zoom in and out and scan around the area, according to Fox News.
"This unique image is a tremendous resource for scientists and the public alike," said John Keller, a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. "It's the latest example of the exciting insights and data products LRO has been providing for nearly five years."
Two LRO Narrow Angel Cameras took the images that make up the mosaic, and are able to record a wide range of lit and shadowed areas. The mosaic shows detailed textures and shading of the moon's surface, and consistent lighting allows viewers to easily compare different regions, Astronomy Magazine reported.
"Creation of this giant mosaic took four years and a huge team effort across the LRO project," said Mark Robinson from Arizona State University in Tempe. "We now have a nearly uniform map to unravel key science questions and find the best landing spots for future exploration."
The whole image measures 931,070 pixels square, which equal a total of about 867 billion pixels, Fox News reported. In order to produce a complete printout at 300 dots per inch, the image needs a sheet of paper wider than and almost as long as a U.S. football field. Rather than going through that process, the scientists divided the mosaic into millions of small, compressed files, which allows users to view and move around the image using a web browser.
LRO was launched into orbit in June of 2009 to map the Moon's surface, research water and important mineral sources, probe the radiation environment, and obtain geological clues about the evolution of the Moon, Astronomy Magazine reported.
With the help of information about the Moon's topography from LRO's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter and gravity information from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL), researchers were able to assemble the mosaic. The GRAIL mission launched in 2011 and used twin spacecraft named Ebb and Flow to create a gravity field map on the Moon. The map was the highest resolution gravity field map of any celestial body.
