LROC PDS Archive Goes live

Today over 100,000 images from LROC’s first six months of observations were made available on the LROC PDS archive webpage.
The LROC EDR (EDR) release includes 105,000 NAC and WAC products, totaling ~10 Terabytes. The Calibrated Data Record (CDR) release also consists of 105,000 products, totaling ~20 TBytes. An additional~ 9 TBytes of ancillary products rounds out the release (total release 49.9 Tbytes).

Each EDR and CDR product has an associated browse image and histogram of the observation Digital Numbers (pixel value). The browse image is a pyramidal TIFF file that is internally tiled with 256x256 tiles for rapid zooming. The layers are constructed by halving the resolution of the previous layer, starting with full resolution as the first layer until a layer is created with only one tile.
 
Along with the EDR and CDR products, there is an INDEX.TAB file that contains information on each individual observation, the parameters commanded, estimated coordinates of the images on the lunar surface, lighting conditions, and other relevant information.

The first PDS release of LROC data, totaling 49.9 TBytes of data, is now posted on NASA’s Planetary Data System. Images are available from the LROC image gallery:

http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_browse
New data will be released every three months.

Published by Mark Robinson on 15 March 2010