You can’t travel to the genuine moon, at least not at the present time. You may have the option to visit the surface for all intents and purposes a little while later, however. NASA has released a visual data set that it calls the “CGI Moon Kit,” which will enable designers to make authentic moonscapes in games and different sorts of media. The kit is, obviously, totally free to download.
The data for the Moon Kit originates from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has been in orbit of the moon since 2009. Its original mission only one year, yet it’s as yet going strong. During its time studying the moon, the LRO has produced a 3D map of nearly the whole surface — 98.2 percent of it, to be definite. The only parts of the moon not secured are the polar areas in deep shadow.
The Moon Kit originates from NASA designer Ernie Wright, who works in the Scientific Visualization Studio at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Wright at first made the Moon Kit as a tool for the Scientific Visualization Studio, however, he got such huge numbers of requests for the data that he decided to make the data set accessible to all designers publicly.
You can download the Moon Kit from the Scientific Visualization Studio website at this moment. It comes as a pair of uncompressed TIFF files. One file is a composite of more than 100,000 photographs taken by the orbiter’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). The biggest size alternative, which is the thing that most designers will want, clocks in at just about 500 megabytes. This is basically a texture map of the moon.
The second TIFF file is what’s known as a displacement map. It contains data from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter instrument (LOLA), which tells you regarding the rise of highlights on the moon. The biggest version indicates 64 pixels for each degree, and clocks in at barely short of 1 GB.
In 3D animation software, you can wrap the two pictures over a spherical shell to make an exact model of the moon. The color file tells the program how the terrain should look, and the displacement map discloses to it how the surface is formed. Nonetheless, this isn’t a ready-made 3D version of the moon you can investigate — it’ll take some genuine 3D design work to make it into something substantial. In the coming years, we may see simulations of the lunar surface that are more exact than whatever preceded.
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