Matthew Reale and Jared Woodward-Poor
In 1997, a satellite named Lunar Prospector was launched by the US to better study the Moon. Lunar Prospector has been collecting data from its orbit around the moon via five different scientific instruments: a magnetometer, an electron reflectometer, and alpha particle, gamma ray, and neutron spectrometers. The magnetometer is used to detect magnetic forces originating from the moon. It measures these forces along three different axes. The electron reflectometer works in conjunction with the magnetometer, and measures the strength of the magnetic fields at the moonUs surface. It does this by analyzing electrons reflected off of the moon. Together, the magnetometer and the electron reflectometer will give scientist a much greater understanding of the magnetic fields on and around the moon. The alpha particle spectrometer is used to detect gasses emanating from the moonUs surface by searching for radioactive alpha particles that are associated with these gasses. The gamma ray spectrometer is used to check for 10 different elements in the moon's crust. This data will help scientists know where to find useful metals in the future, and will shed light on the moonUs history. Finally, the neutron spectrometer is used to discover the presence of hydrogen as it exists in the form of water. In fact, the neutron spectrometer on board the Lunar Prospector recently found water, in the form of ice, at the polar caps of the moon.
Recently, the Prospector has entered a lower orbit for more intensive observation using all of the instruments. NASA has made much of the data available on the World Wide Web for download, and have also put some of this data into visualizations. These visualizations include multiple color line graphs, color map plots, three dimensional map plots, and color contour maps. There is also a way to see (approximately) where the satellite is at any given time. The web site that contains this information, as well as more information regarding the instruments aboard the Prospector is: www.lunar.arc.nasa.gov. We highly recommend you check this website out, as it is very well organized and contains lots of detailed information regarding the Lunar Prospector.
We have several objectives for this project. Our first goal is to become familiar with this data set and its uses. We plan to spend the first few weeks of our project becoming familiar with the different groups of data, and how they are used. Since we have the ability to get raw data off the web, we need to figure out what exactly that data is. During these weeks we intend to write some code, probably in Java, that accesses the data sets and displays graphs and charts similar to the ones NASA uses on their web site. Once we are able to do this, we should be fairly comfortable with the data, and will be ready to try some new ideas.
One of these ideas involves filtering out background noise. Since the data is taken right from the Prospector and put on the web, there is a lot of background noise. The instruments are extremely sensitive, and thus pick up a lot of garbage that is not necessarily useful. This is apparent in the graphs that NASA has made available- they are very jagged and hard to read. We would like to come up with a way to cut down or perhaps eliminate this noise entirely. If we are able to do this, it would make the graphs much more readable and useful.
We would also like to come up with some different ways of viewing the data. NASA basically has one graph per instrument displaying information. The graph displays the data as a function of time. Therefore, the only way to connect that data with the actual surface of the moon is to check where the Prospector is, find out in what direction it is traveling, and then calculate the position of the data from that. We would like to find a way to graph the data directly as a function of the moonUs surface. Ideally, this would be in the form of a three dimensional graph. We would superimpose the raw data on an image of the moonUs surface from which it was taken. The closest NASA has come to this is to make available pictures of the entire moon, using colors to represent different data. For example, in terms of magnetic field, they used hot colors, such as red, to represent areas of high magnetism and cool colors, such as blue, to represent areas of low magnetism. However, this is only available for the entire moon, so it is not very useful if you want to zoom in one particular area. For example, NASAUs graphs could not be used to discover evidence of a golf ball or other remnants of a lunar landingI
This brings us to our third, and most ambitious, objective. Should we be able to get to a point where we can actually create three dimensional graphs and zoom in on certain sections of the moon, we would like to zoom in on the area where NASA supposedly put a man on the moon. Assuming there really was a lunar landing (and it was not filmed in Texas) NASA must have left some sign of their presence, and we would like to find hard evidence to back it up. However, considering there are literally billions of bits of data taken from all over the moon, this objective could be nearly impossible.
Even if we are not able to prove or disprove the lunar landing, we hope to at least come up with some new and creative ways of visualizing NASAUs data. Hopefully, our new visualization ideas will lead to some new extrapolations of the data, and we will be able to discover some interesting and enlightening ways of interpreting that data.