Summary of the results from the lunar orbiter laser altimeter after seven years in lunar orbit
By David E. Smith, Maria T. Zuber, G. Neumann, E. Mazarico, F. LeMoine, Paul G. Lucey, Mark S. Robinson, Xiaoli Sun, M. Torrence, M. Barker and 7 more. 2017
171 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In June 2009 the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft was launched to the Moon. The payload consists of 7 science instruments selected to characterize sites for future robotic and human missions. Among them, the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) was designed to obtain altimetry, surface roughness, and reflectance measurements. The primary phase of lunar exploration lasted one year, following a 3-month commissioning phase. On completion of its exploration objectives, the LRO mission transitioned to a science mission. After 7 years in lunar orbit, the LOLA instrument continues to map the lunar surface. The LOLA dataset is one of the foundational datasets acquired by the various LRO instruments. LOLA provided a high-accuracy global geodetic reference frame to which past, present and future lunar observations can be referenced. It also obtained high-resolution and accurate global topography that were used to determine regions in permanent shadow at the lunar poles. LOLA further contributed to the study of polar volatiles through its unique measurement of surface brightness at zero phase, which revealed anomalies in several polar craters that may indicate the presence of water ice. In this paper, we describe the many LOLA accomplishments to date and its contribution to lunar and planetary science.
Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0937f7f43341f2841e3fac2e2c12e0016772623c
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Citations in the corpus
- A New Global Database of Lunar Impact Craters >1–2 km: 1. Crater Locations and Sizes, Comparisons With Published Databases, and Global Analysis (2019, methodology): “In general, the merged TC DTM + LOLA mosaic was used where it was available: Despite the success of the LOLA instrument and return of>6.8 billion valid data points as of the time of this writing (Smith et al., 2017), there are still multikilometer-wide gaps in the LOLA data set at the lunar equator.”