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Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing with Views of Earth from Satellite and Apollo Missions

A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 May 2020) | Viewed by 5124

Special Issue Editor

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Washington, DC 20546, USA
Interests: computer vision; robotics; machine learning; artificial intelligence

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The Apollo missions had the ambitious objective of putting a man on the moon and returning him safely. They achieved this objective more than 50 years ago, and this is often referred as the most impressive technological achievement in history. Recently, NASA, commercial companies, and international space agencies declared their objectives of returning to the Moon and reaching Mars in the coming decades. We are looking for novel contributions that focus on the extraction of information from historical remote sensing data acquired by the Apollo missions, as well as more recent missions to the Moon, Mars, and other planetary bodies in the Solar System. Of particular interest are novel research works that support the exploration and establishment of a permanent human presence at the lunar poles. Examples of such topics include but are not restricted to surface and regolith characterization, topological feature detection (craters, boulders, lava tubes, lava tube pits), 3D mapping and modeling of the surface, sensor co-registration, and topography estimation in permanently shadowed regions using visible and multispectral imagery.

Dr. Ara Nefian
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • 3D Lunar Mapping and Modeling
  • Multi-Spectral Planetary Surface Characterization
  • Crater and Rock Detection

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

18 pages, 6375 KiB  
Article
Investigating Lunar Boulders at the Apollo 17 Landing Site Using Photogrammetry and Virtual Reality
by Stéphane Le Mouélic, Pauline Enguehard, Harrison H. Schmitt, Gwénaël Caravaca, Benoît Seignovert, Nicolas Mangold, Jean-Philippe Combe and François Civet
Remote Sens. 2020, 12(11), 1900; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12111900 - 11 Jun 2020
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 4665
Abstract
The Taurus-Littrow valley on the Moon was the location of intensive geologic fieldwork during three days in December 1972. In situ activities at sampling stations were systematically documented by the astronauts using a series of overlapping images taken with their Hasselblad cameras. We [...] Read more.
The Taurus-Littrow valley on the Moon was the location of intensive geologic fieldwork during three days in December 1972. In situ activities at sampling stations were systematically documented by the astronauts using a series of overlapping images taken with their Hasselblad cameras. We investigated how this Apollo image archive can be used to perform 3-D reconstructions of several boulders of interest using close-range photogrammetry. We specifically focused on seven different boulders located at Stations 2, 6, and 7, at the foot of South and North Massifs, respectively. These boulders represent samples from highland materials, which rolled down the slopes of the surrounding hills. We used the Agisoft Metashape software to compute 3-D reconstructions of these boulders, using 173 scanned images as input. We then used either a web-based platform or a game engine to render the models in virtual reality. This allowed the users to walk around the boulders and to investigate in detail their morphology, fractures, vesicles, color variations, and sampling spots, as if standing directly in front of them with the astronauts. This work suggests that many features can be reconstructed in other sites of the Apollo missions, so as other robotic landing sites. Virtual reality techniques coupled to photogrammetry is thus opening a new era of exploration, both for past and future landing sites. Full article
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