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Pre-flight and On-orbit Geometric Calibration of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera

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Abstract

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) consists of two imaging systems that provide multispectral and high resolution imaging of the lunar surface. The Wide Angle Camera (WAC) is a seven color push-frame imager with a 90 field of view in monochrome mode and 60 field of view in color mode. From the nominal 50 km polar orbit, the WAC acquires images with a nadir ground sampling distance of 75 m for each of the five visible bands and 384 m for the two ultraviolet bands. The Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) consists of two identical cameras capable of acquiring images with a ground sampling distance of 0.5 m from an altitude of 50 km. The LROC team geometrically calibrated each camera before launch at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California and the resulting measurements enabled the generation of a detailed camera model for all three cameras. The cameras were mounted and subsequently launched on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on 18 June 2009. Using a subset of the over 793000 NAC and 207000 WAC images of illuminated terrain collected between 30 June 2009 and 15 December 2013, we improved the interior and exterior orientation parameters for each camera, including the addition of a wavelength dependent radial distortion model for the multispectral WAC. These geometric refinements, along with refined ephemeris, enable seamless projections of NAC image pairs with a geodetic accuracy better than 20 meters and sub-pixel precision and accuracy when orthorectifying WAC images.

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Acknowledgements

The LROC Team would like to acknowledge Michael Ravine, Michael Caplinger, Jacob Schaffner and the other scientists and engineers at Malin Space Science Systems who designed, built, and integrated the LROC system. We would not be able to create products with such a high level of precision and accuracy without their attention to detail and craftsmanship. We would also like to acknowledge the superior work of Erwan Mazarico and Gregory Neumann of the LOLA and GRAIL Science Teams in deriving the improved ephemeris for the LRO Spacecraft that we used in this study. We would finally like to thank Ella Lee and Lynn Weller of the USGS Astrogeology Science Center for producing several large control mosaics used to derive the absolute twist of the NAC-L and NAC-R instruments as well as the two reviewers whose detailed criticisms helped improve and clarify this manuscript.

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Correspondence to E. J. Speyerer.

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This paper is a Special Communication, related to the topical volume on ‘Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission’, Space Science Reviews, Volume 150, 2010, guest edited by R.R. Vondrak, J.W. Keller and C.T. Russell.

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11214_2014_73_MOESM1_ESM.gif

Animation of the Apollo 14 landing site showing a before and after comparison of the relative twist correction (GIF 620 kB)

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Speyerer, E.J., Wagner, R.V., Robinson, M.S. et al. Pre-flight and On-orbit Geometric Calibration of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. Space Sci Rev 200, 357–392 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-014-0073-3

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