Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera

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Operations Journal: Digital Elevation Models (DEM)

August 25, 2009

My name's Tawny, and I am one of the ASU undergraduate student workers at LROC. One of the many fun tasks I get to do is to produce Digital Elevation Models (DEM) of the lunar surface by using specialized hardware and software to extract elevation data on the Moon from stereo images. A DEM is like a digital version of an old-fashioned contour map and essentially provides the elevation of the surface for each pixel. For a pair of images to be stereo, it must show the same location on the Moon taken with different illumination conditions. Or, to put it another way, the relative angles of the Sun, the lunar surface, and the spacecraft have to be different for each picture while showing the same region.

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