With the first interactive lunar north pole mosaic released by the NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team you can explore an area of the Moon’s northern hemisphere about the size of Alaska and Texas combined.
The interactive mosaic consists of 10,581 images collected over four years of observations made by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). While the image above is a still, you can explore the interactive version here. The interactive map allows you to zoom in on craters and other features to amazing detail, and a list of notable features allows you to quickly pan and find fresh craters, impact melts, and even the tracks left by a boulder rolling down a crater’s central peak.
About two years into its mission, LRO changed its orbit from a near-circle to a highly elliptical path that crossed over both poles. The new orbit took the spacecraft closest to the lunar south pole and high above the lunar north pole. At such high altitudes the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), an instrument with narrow and wide angle cameras, was able to capture images of a vast amount of surface area. This led to a complete mosaic map of the Moon’s surface from 60°N to the geographic north pole with a resolution of 2 meters (6.5 feet) per pixel.
To put this in perspective, the area of the Moon that this mosaic allows you to explore is a little bit bigger than the size of Alaska and Texas combined — roughly an area of 2.54 million square kilometers (0.98 million square miles)!
If the soaring view of the Moon’s top half piques your curiosity, S&T has produced a full Moon globe based on 15,000 wide-angle LRO images, with labels for over 850 craters, valleys, lunar landing sites, and more.