We are pleased to announce a new schedule for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) releases to the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS). Beginning on Monday, 15 October, we release Wide-Angle Camera (WAC) and Narrow-Angle Camera (NAC) data each month. Before this, we released data on a quarterly basis. The monthly schedule will make new LROC data available more quickly and in smaller, more easily managed quantities.
The three-month lag time between data acquisition and data release to the PDS will not change; monthly releases will, however, reduce the gap between acquisition and release to no more than four months. In the past, as many as six months could separate acquisition from release to the PDS.
The first LROC Planetary Data System release on the new schedule, designated 36A, includes NAC and WAC images acquired from 16 June 2018 through 15 July 2018. This release contains 20,503 Experiment Data Record (EDR) images totaling 2.4 TBytes, and 20,503 Calibrated Data Record (CDR) images totaling 5.1 TBytes.
LROC PDS release 36B will follow in mid-November, and the last monthly release of volume 36, designated 36C, will occur in mid-December. In mid-January, release 37A will occur. The volume number will change on a quarterly basis to match the quarterly release designations of other LRO instruments and the letters A, B, and C will designate the first, second, and third monthly releases of each quarter.
To date, the LROC Team has delivered 2,403,608 EDRs totaling 351.4 TBytes, 2,401,592 CDRs totaling 649.7 TBytes, and 29,302 derived (Reduced Data Record - RDR) data products totaling 6.83 TBytes to the PDS. The current RDR collection includes: NAC Digital Terrain Models (DTMs); NAC Region of Interest (ROI) Mosaics; NAC North/South Polar Mosaics; WAC Global Morphology mosaics; WAC Monthly Global mosaics; WAC DTM, WAC Color Shade, WAC Empirically Normalized Nearly Global mosaics; and WAC ROI mosaics.
The RDR dataset includes NAC Anaglyphs and a variety of Shapefiles in the EXTRAS file. The LROC Team has also released a PDF-formatted NAC Stereo Catalog that contains all NAC pair and triplet observations. This can be used for generating DTMs.
The complete LROC PDS archive can be accessed via the URL:
Below you can zoom in and explore the montage at the top of this post in more detail. One can also search for specific images or mosaic products using the LROC WMS Browse interface. Also, please be sure and try out our Quickmap interface!
Published by Nick Estes on 15 October 2018