Annual Illumination and Topographic Slope of the Moon's South Polar Ridge

Abstract

This map is based on data released by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). The map is centered between de Gerlache and Shackleton craters and shows slopes derived from the LOLA 5-m elevation product (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Smith et al., 2010; Smith et al., 2017) using Horn's formula binned into three slope ranges and assigned color values. The slope data are overlain on LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC) 100-m-scale percentage of illumination map (Speyerer and Robinson, 2013). Black shaded areas indicate steep slopes and/or low illumination conditions. Polar stereographic projection is used with scale true at the pole. Feature names are included on the map.