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Lunar Prospector

February 2, 2021. Lunar Prospector PDS4 Archives

Lunar Prospector archives at the Geosciences Node have been migrated to the PDS4 standard. This includes calibrated GRS and NS data, GRS elemental abundance tables, and spherical harmonic gravity models.

The original PDS3 data products, labels, and documentation remain available in their original archive volumes. The only change is that PDS4 labels and documentation have been added to the archives. The original data files are unchanged.

Lunar Prospector (LP) was a spin-stabilized spacecraft, operating in a 100 km circular, polar orbit around the Moon during its Primary Mission in 1998. The orbit was lowered to 30 km for the Extended Mission that began in January 1999. The mission ended on July 31, 1999, when the spacecraft was targeted to impact a crater near the lunar south pole to try to vaporize part of the suspected water deposits.

The science goals of LP were to map the Moon's surface composition and its magnetic and gravity fields, to determine the frequency and location of gas release events, and to search for polar ice deposits. To meet these objectives, LP had five science instruments located on three booms: a gamma ray spectrometer, a neutron spectrometer, an alpha particle spectrometer, a magnetometer, and an electron reflectometer. In addition, Doppler tracking data was used to derive gravity measurements.

The preliminary science results from Lunar Prospector have been published in the September 4, 1998 issue of Science. Also, a detailed description of the Lunar Prospector spacecraft is available in the LP Mission Handbook document (Adobe Acrobat format file; 760 KB).

Lunar Prospector Data Sets

Level 0 Data Archive
Raw data from the gamma ray spectrometer, neutron spectrometer, alpha particle spectrometer, magnetometer, and electron reflectometer; raw engineering data; spacecraft ephemeris files for the Primary and Extended Missions.
 
Level 1 Spectrometer Data Archive
Preliminary versions of gamma ray integrated spectra and maps of thorium, potassium, thermal neutrons, and epithermal neutrons.
 
Spectrometer Reduced Data
  • Corrected gamma ray and neutron spectra.
  • Neutron and elemental abundance maps from gamma ray and neutron spectrometers.
Spherical Harmonic Gravity Models and Digital Gravity Maps
Spherical harmonic models of the lunar gravity field, digital maps of Bouguer anomalies, free-air gravity accelerations and errors, and geoid anomalies and errors.
 
Line-Of-Sight (LOS) Gravity Data
Line-of-sight acceleration profiles (LOSAPDRs).
 
Level 1 Magnetometer / Electron Reflectometer Data
Time series magnetometer and reflectometer data sets available from the PDS Planetary Plasma Interactions (PPI) Node.
 
Orbit Data Files (ODFs)
Orbit tracking data from the Deep Space Network (DSN). These files are not part of a PDS archive but are provided as-is because of interest expressed by users of LP data derived from these files.
 

Lunar Prospector Search Tools

Lunar Orbital Data Explorer (ODE) - Provides search, display, and download  tools for selected Lunar Prospector data sets.
 
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