The LRO Diviner Foundation Dataset: A Comprehensive Temperature Record of the Moon

Abstract:

The Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been systematically mapping the thermal state of the Moon at a mean rate of >1400 observations/second since July 2009. Diviner measures solar reflectance and infrared radiance in 9 spectral channels with bandpasses from 0.3 – 400 μm. With more than 5 years of continuous data, complete spatial coverage of the lunar surface is achieved multiple times and coverage of local solar time enables the diurnal curve to be well-resolved for a given subsolar point.

The Diviner Foundation Dataset (FDS) represents a coordinated effort to recalibrate raw data to improve quality, and produce a definitive and comprehensive set of products for use by the lunar science community. We present the contents and organization of the FDS, background on the enhanced processing pipeline, show how it is retrieved from NASA’s Planetary Data System, and demonstrate its use with common mapping & analysis tools.

The FDS comprises level 1 Reduced Data Records (RDRs) and level 2/3 Gridded Data Records (GDRs). We produce new RDRs using improved calibration algorithms that remove instrument artifacts and improve accuracy of measured radiance, particularly for polar data in permanently shadowed regions. GDRs are built using a per-orbit gridding scheme, and data are sourced from a database constructed by modeling the effective field-of-view for each observation.

Notable gridded products available for lunar science include: 1) Globally mapped brightness temperatures for all channels in tiled cylindrical and polar stereographic map projections, 2) Global hourly temperature snapshots – maps of bolometric temperature binned into 1 hour intervals of local time, 3) Topographic products (elevation, slope and azimuth) for each map tile, that represent the terrain model used to process the data, and 4) Accompanying gridded maps of auxiliary quantities such as emission angle, local solar time, error etc…, for filtering observations to those within desired constraints.