Although the Moon is a well-known celestial body, it still has many white spots on its surface. The Chinese decided to fill them up by creating the most detailed map of the Silver Globe in history.
The map, the creation of which took more than 100 scientists, reveals the composition and structure of the lunar surface and reflects the evolutionary processes occurring on our natural satellite. The paper, published in Science Bulletin, concluded that such maps could be crucial in terms of exploration planning and landing site selection for future space missions.
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The Americans created a series of lunar maps based on data collected during the Apollo mission. However, they were made at different times and according to different standards, so not all structures fit together. The latest map neatly avoids this problem.
China’s lunar search program began in 2004. Since then, the Middle Kingdom has sent a series of orbiters, landers and rovers (Chang’e missions) to our natural satellite, to collect data that was used to create a high-resolution map.
The lunar mapping project was started in 2012 by geologists Ouyang Ziyuan and Liu Jianzhong of the Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guiyang. To create a 1:2.5 million scale map, the researchers first divided the moon into 30 squares and mapped them individually using the same criteria. Then they put them together to create a complete map.
Americans have a standardized digital map of the Moon at a scale of 1: 5 million, but it is not as detailed as a Chinese map of 1: 2.5 million. It includes 12,341 craters, 81 impact craters, 17 types of rocks and 14 types of surface structures.
Data from the Chinese Chang’e mission, supplemented with data from international exploration programs, was primarily used to create the map. full resolution map It can be downloaded from here.
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