ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 moon orbiter is taking the highest-resolution photos yet of the moon’s surface:
Chandrayaan 2 orbiter has an optical camera called the Orbiter High-Resolution Camera (OHRC) that captures detailed images of the moon. OHRC can image at a best resolution of 0.25 meters/pixel, beating NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (LRO) best of 0.5 meters/pixel.
Back in October, we already saw OHRC flex its muscles by sending images including clearly visible boulders less than 1 meter in size. And now OHRC has demonstrated imaging an area not directly illuminated by sunlight. It captured an image of a crater floor in shadow by seeing the dim light falling on it that has been reflected from the crater rim.
Moving ahead, this capability will be used to image insides of craters on the lunar poles, where sunlight never reaches. Mapping the terrain of polar craters is important because future lunar habitats are believed to be stationed near them, transporting water and other resources from inside them.
In addition to the high-resolution camera,
The Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC 2) onboard Chandrayaan 2 is a stereo imager, meaning it can capture 3-D images. It does that by imaging the same site from three different angles, akin to NASA’s LRO, from which a 3-D image is constructed.
And it’s already yielding results
Chandrayaan 2’s orbiter is in the process of adequately quantifying just how much water ice is trapped beneath the permanently dark crater floors on the moon’s poles. Current estimates based on past observations suggest that the moon’s poles host more than 600 billion kg of water ice, equivalent to at least 240,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.