Publication Date:
2008-10-25
Description:
The inside of Shackleton Crater at the lunar south pole is permanently shadowed; it has been inferred to hold water-ice deposits. The Terrain Camera (TC), a 10-meter-resolution stereo camera onboard the Selenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE) spacecraft, succeeded in imaging the inside of the crater, which was faintly lit by sunlight scattered from the upper inner wall near the rim. The estimated temperature of the crater floor, based on the crater shape model derived from the TC data, is less than approximately 90 kelvin, cold enough to hold water-ice. However, at the TC's spatial resolution, the derived albedo indicates that exposed relatively pure water-ice deposits are not on the crater floor. Water-ice may be disseminated and mixed with soil over a small percentage of the area or may not exist at all.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Haruyama, Junichi -- Ohtake, Makiko -- Matsunaga, Tsuneo -- Morota, Tomokatsu -- Honda, Chikatoshi -- Yokota, Yasuhiro -- Pieters, Carle M -- Hara, Seiichi -- Hioki, Kazuyuki -- Saiki, Kazuto -- Miyamoto, Hideaki -- Iwasaki, Akira -- Abe, Masanao -- Ogawa, Yoshiko -- Takeda, Hiroshi -- Shirao, Motomaro -- Yamaji, Atsushi -- Josset, Jean-Luc -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2008 Nov 7;322(5903):938-9. doi: 10.1126/science.1164020. Epub 2008 Oct 23.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Sagamihara, Kanagawa 229-85105, Japan.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18948501" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Cold Temperature
;
Extraterrestrial Environment
;
*Ice
;
*Moon
;
Spacecraft
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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