Clementine

Clementine

(glossary entry)

Description

A "Star Wars" mission designed by the US Naval Research Laboratory and intended to rendevous with and image a near-earth asteroid. Launched in January 1994, it spent the shake-down phase of its mission orbiting the Moon and radioed back many thousands of high resolution images of the lunar surface at a variety of wavelengths, as well as altimeter data. The spacecraft failed in June 1994 before attempting its intended asteroid rendevous. The individual images are quite small by modern CCD standards (less than 400 pixels on a side), and are commonly seen mosaiced together to create larger images.
 
 

Additional Information

• Individual Clementine images and support data (date, time and spacecraft position from which the photos were taken) can be most efficiently retrieved from the Clementine link ("Products Search") on the PDS Imaging Node. Mosaics of extended regions can be produced through the USGS' Map-a-Planet service.
• There are several notations used for refering to individual Clementine frames, most of which identify the orbit, filter, etc. The one used on the PDS Imaging Node is explained here
• There has been considerable controversy about the registration of the Clementine images, and it is now generally acknowledged that the tiles in the images returned by PDS Map-a-Planet (and other such products) are not in quite their correct selenodetic positions. The USGS has recently released a new "control network", ULCN 2005 which is supposed to provide accurate lunar coordinates and elevations (relative to the Moon's center) for selected points on selected Clementine images covering the entire lunar surface. Identifying most of the points that have been "calibrated" is extremely difficult, as they refer not to lunar features, but rather to pixel positions on specific frames; and the accuracy of the results has not yet been verified. This situation has been rectified by the release of a "warped" version of the Clementine basemap in which the pixel locations have been shifted to their proper positions according to the ULCN 2005. Hence a mouse readout from this new version is supposed to return the "correct" selenodetic location for the feature being pointed to. It is available as "Greyscale Image V2" on the new Map-a-Planet site. - Jim Mosher
• Clementine Explores the Moon -- a slideshow of Clementine results.

LPOD Articles

• The Biggest Moon on Earth (the Oberhausen Gasometer 25 m balloon-moon, composed of Clementine photographs of the entire moon's surface)

Bibliography:

Wikipedia article
Naval Research Lab Clementine page
USGS Clementine page
Links from National Space Science Data Center

Trivia

Those who are familiar with British New Wave Synth-pop music of the early eighties know the artist John Foxx (once a member of the band Ultravox). There's an artistic photograph of John Foxx which could have been the inspiration for the creator (or creators?) of the mission patch of the probe Clementine. The quite serious looking face of the depicted girl on the mission patch (Clementine) looks quite the same as John Foxx on that photograph!
  I wonder why the mission patch of Clementine is not included in the Wikipedia page.
 - DannyCaes Sep 16, 2017

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