Related papers: Measuring Mountains on the Moon
Why does the Sun have a radius around 696000~km? We will see in this article that dimensional arguments can be used to understand the size of the Sun and of a few other things along the way. These arguments are not new and can be found…
Galileo determined distances to stars based on the assumption that stars were suns, the apparent sizes of stars as seen through his telescope, and basic geometry. However, the apparent sizes that he measured were the result of diffraction…
The regain of interest in Moon exploration has substantially grown in the last years. For this reason, the space agencies consider the development of a precise navigation and positioning service similar to the Earth GNSS. Aiming at some…
We propose a framework for global-scale canopy height estimation based on satellite data. Our model leverages advanced data preprocessing techniques, resorts to a novel loss function designed to counter geolocation inaccuracies inherent in…
Topography is the expression of both internal and external processes of a planetary body. Thus hypsometry (the study of topography) is a way to decipher the dynamic of a planet. For that purpose, the statistics of height and slopes may be…
Approximate distance estimation can be used to determine fundamental landscape properties including complexity and openness. We show that variations in the skyline of landscape photos can be used to estimate distances to trees on the…
A long-standing, unanswered question regarding Euclid's Elements concerns the absence of a theorem for the concurrence of the altitudes of a triangle, and the possible reasons for this omission. In the centuries following Euclid, a…
The Moon is a unique platform for fundamental astrophysical measurements of gravitation, the Sun, and the Universe. Lacking a permanent ionosphere and, on the farside, shielded from terrestrial radio emissions, a radio telescope on the Moon…
Autonomous precision navigation to land onto the Moon relies on vision sensors. Computer vision algorithms are designed, trained and tested using synthetic simulations. High quality terrain models have been produced by Moon orbiters…
The leading theory for the origin of the Moon is the giant impact hypothesis, in which the Moon was formed out of the debris left over from the collision of a Mars-sized body with the Earth. Soon after its formation, the orbit of the Moon…
We have obtained empirical laws for the variation of the Earth parameters with geologic time that are in agreement with coral fossil data obtained by Wells and Runcorn. Our model predicts that the day is lengthening at a rate of 2…
We report measurements from which we determine the spatial structure of the lunar contribution to night sky brightness, taken at the LSST site on Cerro Pachon in Chile. We use an array of six photodiodes with filters that approximate the…
The tropopause is the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere, so its height determines the nature of processes in the atmosphere and depends on them. The criterion for determining the height of the tropopause is a decrease in…
Astrometry is a powerful technique in astrophysics to measure three-dimensional positions of stars and other astrophysical objects, including exoplanets and the gravitational influence they have on each other. Interferometric astrometry is…
The moon is receding from earth at an average rate of 3.8 cm/yr [6][7][9][12].This anomaly cannot be attributed to the well-known tidal exchange of angular momentum between earth and moon [8]. A secular change in the astronomical unit AU is…
Characterised by a surface bound exosphere and localised crustal magnetic fields, the Moon was considered as a passive object when solar wind interacts with it. However, the neutral particle and plasma measurements around the Moon by recent…
Recovering a person's height from a single image is important for virtual garment fitting, autonomous driving and surveillance, however, it is also very challenging due to the absence of absolute scale information. We tackle the rarely…
The lunar surface has historically been considered an optimal site for a broad range of astronomical telescopes. That assumption, which has come to be somewhat reflexive, is critically examined in this paper and found to be poorly…
Understanding the Moon's formation mechanism is necessary for studying not only the Moon itself, but also the evolution, formation, habitability, and structure of other planets and the moons in the Solar system and in extrasolar planetary…
The frequency and the characteristics of lunar impacting meteorites are reconsidered under the general assumption of belonging to the sporadic meteoroids. We develop the model for evaluating the luminous energy detected in the visual band…