It's June - Better LOLA? Options

[Rick Sternbach]

Okay, It's June 15. Where's the updated LOLA data? I keep finding the stuff from March in all the usual places. Okay, I'm sure it may take a few days, but does anyone have a clue if the LDEMs are going to get cleaner and crisper this time around?

I've already seen a resin casting of a moon globe made from the LDEM_64 data, but I wanted to wait a bit until more blanks were filled in.

Rick

[Phil Stooke]

It takes time to get it all fixed up... but people, if you want to see how unbelievable LOLA is going to be when it's all done, check out this amazing presentation from the NASA Lunar Science Forum, held at NASA Ames last month. This is by Maria Zuber, and - alas - it didn't survive the PDF-making process properly. I have asked if it can be fixed. But even so, it looks good. Check out the LOLA map of the floor of Shackleton on page 15. As I say I've asked for it to be fixed, so we'll see.


http://lunarscience2010.arc.nasa.gov/sites...files/Zuber.pdf

Other pressies here:

http://lunarscience2010.arc.nasa.gov/agenda

Lots of goodies.

Phil

[James Fincannon]

"It takes time to get it all fixed up... but people, if you want to see how unbelievable LOLA is going to be when it's all done, check out this amazing presentation from the NASA Lunar Science Forum, held at NASA Ames last month. This is by Maria Zuber, and - alas - it didn't survive the PDF-making process properly. I have asked if it can be fixed. But even so, it looks good. Check out the LOLA map of the floor of Shackleton on page 15. "


Yes, it looks good, and is much better than what we have had and they are doing great work.

But there are some points that should be emphasized (and I do not think they are sufficiently)........

For a 25 m/pixel grid for within 25 km of the South Pole,
(1) Only 72% of the grid elements have at least one laser data point. This means 28% are empty, but the DEMs show them filled (interpolated). This is a concern to me because although it creates a nice continuous image/DEM, it needs an accompanying error map to help a user to understand the missing data, interpolation error, etc.
(2) The average number of laser data points in this grid is 1.5 +- 1.4. For a 25m by 25 m pixel, you would like around 25 laser data points to get good coverage with 5 m diameter spots. This means when the DEM is constructed, the height for that pixel is supposed to be an average height of the surface, but really it is the height average of from 0% to 12% of the surface area within the pixel.
(3) How does the laser data point treats the area it "paints"? Is this the average height within the 5 m spot or the highest spot or what?


With coarser grids (240 m by 240 m/pixel), the percentage of surface area with laser data spots is around 8%.

Thus the magic of creating the DEM (i.e. sausage making) has alot of aspects that people need to realize and see if it applies to their usage. I have been stymied from doing illumination analysis because of these concerns. Sure I can do it and have done it with my analysis tools and use either the DEMs or the actual laser points, but I cannot create an error bar, so I have to reassess this laser data DEM.