Largest Picture - 681 Gigapixels?

So now after successes after successes, humans are able to image a whole north pole of moon on a very vast, area wise, canvas. In 2009 NASA launched Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to map the surface of Moon and to observe the key places and figures for landing purposes. We all know our Moon is our savior from comets and meteorites by galvanizing itself to protect Earth. So a suitable landing zone is necessary for future mission to moon. You can see the mosaic by clicking/tapping here.

"After two and a half years in a near-circular polar orbit, LRO entered an elliptical polar orbit on 11 December 2011 with a periapsis (point where the LRO is closest to the surface) near the south pole, and the apoapsis (point where LRO is furthest from the surface) near the north pole."

― source: lroc.sese.asu.edu

The increased altitude of orbiter to the surface of the northern hemisphere allowed two Narrow Angle Cameras (NAC) and Wide Angle Camera (WAC) to capture the vast terrain of the the territory.
In this picture, every single pixel represents 2 meter land of the northern hemisphere.

To be accurate 10,581 images were taken by NACs which took about 4 years for LRO to combine the images into a giant mosaic. This mosaic was named Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera Northern Polar Mosaic (LNPM) which is currently the greatest mosaic available today. Over 680 gigapixel by the valid image data covering 2.54 million km² or 0.98 million miles² of the Moon, slightly larger than the combined area of the two cities of America i.e. Alaska and Texas.

Calculations and data collected from lroc.sese.asu.edu

Description of LNPM:

• Square image; 931,070 pixels across and down
• Total pixels: 866,891,344,900 (867 billion)
• Pixels with image data: 680,808,991,627 (681 billion)
• NAC images: 10,581
• Size of compressed mosaic: 950 Gigabytes

Zain Ul Mustafa

Cakes, conspiracies, and computers are my daily pills.

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