moon mission photos

[P3D Peter Abrahams <telscope@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>just completed mapping the whole moon or some significant portion of it with
>a little heard of military satellite. They must have thousands of stereo
>pairs that were used in the mapping process. 
The Clementine mission orbited a satellite around the moon in the early 90s.
It was a huge success, the first multi-spectral photos (allowing
mineralogical mapping), in great detail, and no doubt many of the images
have a neighbor with sufficient overlap to form a stereo pair.  There is a
web site with large amounts of data.
http://www.nrl.navy.mil/clementine/clib
or ftp site   clementine.s1.gov
Like most astronomical programs of today, the CCDs used produced an enormous
amount of data, and scientists often want to move on to another sexy
mission, the reduction of the data is neglected, and the images are 'given'
to the public.  In this case, they were released as a set of 88 CDs, for
$528., an incredible bargain, for sale at the NSSDC, Nat'l Space Science
Data Center,
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cd-rom/cd-rom.html
The only minor caveat is, as usual, they are raw data, binary form, and must
be processed into intelligible images.
They also have the sky in x-ray, in infra-red; Venus, Mars, Jupiter, etc.  A
stereo of Jupiter, seen from near-by, would be worth doing.
______________________________
Peter Abrahams    telscope@xxxxxxxxxx
  the history of the telescope, the microscope, and the prism binocular


------------------------------