High Resolution Global Topographic Map of Moon 68
stuckinarut writes "NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has released the highest resolution near-global topographic map of the moon ever created. From the article: '"Our new topographic view of the moon provides the dataset that lunar scientists have waited for since the Apollo era," says Mark Robinson, Principal Investigator of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera from Arizona State University in Tempe. "We can now determine slopes of all major geologic terrains on the moon at 100 meter scale. Determine how the crust has deformed, better understand impact crater mechanics, investigate the nature of volcanic features, and better plan future robotic and human missions to the moon."'"
Re:Cheese (Score:4, Interesting)
I miss the days when the Google maps folk had a sense of humour.
Been looking forward to this (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a slow-going project to render the moon using Povray [google.com]. Except, because I'm awkward, I've terraformed it. There are some very slightly better (but still very poor) videos here [youtube.com] and here [youtube.com].
I'm using a monster dataset from the Kaguya spaceprobe for the terrain data, which, at maximum resolution, ends up as a 270MB 16-bit greyscale PNG file. Even so, it's only about 4 pixels per degree and, as you can tell from the videos above, the terrain is way too smooth to be interesting. I've experimented with adding algorithmic complexity with some pretty good results, and need to render the videos, but it's cripplingly slow and is, of course, cheating. [*]
So a higher-resolution dataset is great news for me. Now I just need to figure out how to get a global DEM at the highest possible resolution, which is not easy (I can see DEMs at 64 pixels/degree, but the 256 pixels/degree data appears to be available only in tiles with odd projections).
[*] Also, procedural code in Povray is very slow. I have been looking into rewriting the whole thing in Renderman but my model is too pathologically weird for most Renderman implementations --- I'm viewing a very, very large sphere with huge displacement shaders from very, very close up, and the open source Rendermans I've tried so far just curl up and die. Any suggestions gratefully appreciated.