Exploring The Moon's Permanently Shadowed Regions With ShadowCam
Th Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter's NASA-funded instrument ShadowCam has delivered its first image of a permanently shadowed region of the moon. See the image and learn about the instrument here.
Credit: Arizona State University
Music: Clearer Views by From Now On / courtesy of Epidemic Sound
Credit: Arizona State University
Music: Clearer Views by From Now On / courtesy of Epidemic Sound
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TechTranscript
00:00 (soft music)
00:02 - I don't know what we're gonna find.
00:04 I'm Mark Robinson.
00:07 I'm the principal investigator of the ShadowCam experiment
00:10 and I'm a professor at Arizona State University.
00:13 - Well, it's a fancy camera
00:14 flying around on a satellite around the moon.
00:17 (soft music)
00:19 (soft music)
00:22 - Where LROC works to get pictures
00:35 of the lit up regions of the moon,
00:36 ShadowCam is designed to look at the areas
00:39 that don't get any light at all,
00:40 the permanently shadowed regions.
00:42 - You have a camera on board a spacecraft
00:44 a hundred kilometers above the surface
00:46 moving at a mile a second
00:47 and you have to take an image of something
00:49 that's not exposed to any sunlight at all.
00:51 So, if you've ever taken images in the dark
00:54 with your camera,
00:56 it's very hard to get a really good image.
00:58 And so ShadowCam is specially designed
01:00 to be able to take images
01:01 in those extremely challenging conditions
01:03 to be able to get the information
01:05 that the science community needs
01:06 to really explore what are in these permanently shadowed areas.
01:09 - So ShadowCam, it has a much more sensitive detector.
01:14 It's 200 times more sensitive.
01:16 So that allows us,
01:17 as we fly over these permanently shadowed craters,
01:20 to take very detailed images
01:23 using light reflected off of nearby surfaces
01:26 into the shadow.
01:27 And by doing that,
01:31 we will be able to now understand
01:34 what is in these craters.
01:35 - We are very much intrigued about the amount of like,
01:40 you know, water ice or frost or patches of ice
01:45 or maybe in, there are research papers
01:47 which talk about thick ice sheets on the moon
01:50 and things like that, right?
01:51 So there's this huge anticipation of that
01:53 there will be some frozen areas on the moon.
01:55 And there might just be.
01:56 And it's highly possible that ShadowCam may capture them.
01:59 But it might also be that we do see for ourselves
02:03 that there's nothing like that there.
02:05 My name is Prashanth Mohanty,
02:08 and I'm the deputy PI for the ShadowCam instrument,
02:11 which is on board the KPLO spacecraft,
02:14 also known as Danuri in the local Korean language.
02:18 And it's now orbiting the moon
02:20 and it's taking pictures
02:21 of the permanently shadowed regions.
02:24 The ShadowCam instrument was jointly developed
02:27 by Arizona State University
02:29 and Million Space Sciences Systems,
02:31 guidance of NASA's funding.
02:33 - So we got the first image down and it was beautiful.
02:38 It was in focus.
02:40 The exposure was exactly, you know,
02:42 within a few percent of what we had anticipated it to be.
02:47 We'll do the science bit over the next six months to a year,
02:50 but it works.
02:51 And that's always incredibly stressful
02:54 on any of these missions,
02:56 is it gonna work or not?
02:57 Because now, I was just about to say,
02:59 now the fun part begins.
03:01 But, you know, despite all of the trials and tribulations
03:06 of building the instrument,
03:07 getting it on the spacecraft and launching it,
03:10 that's fun too.
03:11 So the second phase begins, let's just put it that way,
03:14 right, is the science phase begins.
03:16 - We get the data and it's in a raw form
03:19 and we pass it through a series of pipelines, we call them.
03:22 So it's like a series of computer scripts
03:24 that analyze the data and render it into an image
03:27 that can actually be viewed.
03:29 - There's different rovers and landers being planned
03:31 to go to the South Pole,
03:33 specifically to investigate permanently shadowed regions.
03:35 And so having an imagery data set
03:37 allows you to identify boulders and craters
03:40 and come up with a safe traversability plan.
03:43 So there's kind of a wide spectrum of uses
03:45 for anyone who's interested in the South Pole of the moon.
03:49 - It will answer some questions
03:50 and it will raise many more questions than it answers.
03:54 I can guarantee, that's the one thing I can guarantee.
03:56 But I don't know which questions it's gonna answer.
04:01 [BLANK_AUDIO]