martedì 25 marzo 2025

What Is The Mineral Moon?


This photo from Alexandru Barbovschi and Marek Stromayer shows the International Space Station transiting the full mineral Moon as observed from the Republic of Moldovia, on March 26, 2021.


But what is the mineral Moon? Well, it's always our Moon, of course.


Seriously, the mineral Moon is a photography technique which involves capturing wide-field images of our satellite by color sensors, and processing them in order to extrapolate the large amount of information contained in the pics.


This technique was utilized in the early 1990s by Galileo spacecraft that photographed the Moon's colors.

For example, the following image is a mosaic of 53 images, recorded by the Jupiter-bound Galileo spacecraft as it passed near our Moon in 1992. The pics, recorded through three spectral filters, were combined in an exaggerated false-color scheme.



More at this link.


In summary, different colors of the Moon’s surface  represent different chemical compositions. For instance, blue areas are rich in titanium, orange ones are titanium poor. Regions abundant in titanium are of interest because lunar titanium is bound to oxygen.


The mineral distribution on the lunar surface was mapped in great detail by the US Clementine probe, launched on 25 January 1994.

For over two months Clementine mapped the Moon, producing the first multispectral global digital map of the Moon, the first global topographic map, and contributing several other important scientific discoveries.

To conclude you can produce images of the Moon, showing colors of its surface, without having to launch a spacecraft to do so.


Here is a tutorial, if you are interested. 


First image's source and further reading. 



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