CosmoQuest has a large presence at this year’s AGU in Washington, DC, from Dec 10-14, 2018. We have a number of posters and presentations by our team members. If you’re there, come by and check out what we’ve been doing!

Postdoctoral Research Scientist Matthew Richardson will be presenting PA23C-08: Effects of Incidence Angle on Crowd-sourced Crater Detection

When: Tuesday, 11 December 2018 14:02 – 14:05
Where: Walter E Washington Convention Center – eLightning Theater I

Description: Many studies have utilized lunar crater population statistics to understand the formation and evolutionary history of lunar surface features, to estimate relative and absolute ages of regions on the Moon’s surface, as well as to establish chronologies for other planetary surfaces via extrapolation from the lunar record. Fundamentally, these studies have relied on the ability of investigators to accurately and, to a certain extent, completely identify lunar craters of varying size that are larger than a predefined minimum diameter within a given region of interest. While high-resolution image data provided by instruments such as those aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) allow investigators to probe crater populations at the meter scale, it has been suggested and shown by a few analyses that solar incidence angle can have an effect on the detection of craters, particularly at smaller scales.
Studying the effects of solar incidence angle is feasible using LRO images, as the data sets provide recurring high resolution images of the same region over a range of solar incidence angles. Focusing on the Apollo 15 landing region imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Narrow-Angle Camera, we have utilized the crater counts obtained by trained citizen scientists participating in CosmoQuest’s Moon Mappers project. To date, this project has achieved in the order of tens of thousands of crater identifications. Here, we present the results of our analysis.

Elightning poster:
https://agu2018fallmeeting-agu.ipostersessions.com/default.aspx?s=11-4B-6F-52-C6-D2-AD-11-78-C5-D0-3C-1F-29-91-84