LROC NAC-derived Meter-scale Topography of the Moon’s South Polar Landing Sites: Digital Terrain Models and Their Quality Assessments

Abstract High-quality digital terrain models (DTMs) are essential for lunar polar missions, aiding mission planning and surface operations. The horizontal resolution and vertical accuracy of DTMs are generally limited by factors such as source image resolution, image noise, the precision of ground control points (GCPs), and data processing techniques. In this study, we produced advanced DTMs for the lunar south pole region by integrating seamless mosaics generated from multiple Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera Narrow Angle Camera image pairs captured under various illumination azimuths. To enhance accuracy and reduce artifacts, we employed bundle adjustment with hundreds of meticulously selected image-to-image tie points and precise GCPs, combined with an advanced multiview shape-from-shading technique. This technique, which utilizes multiple viewpoints to resolve topographic details with higher precision, significantly improves vertical accuracy and resolution. Our methodology achieves a spatial resolution of 1 m pixel −1 and vertical precision of ±1.0 m, enabling clearer delineation of meter-scale lunar topographic features compared to previous models. These DTMs are expected to significantly support the Lunar Polar Exploration project and other forthcoming lunar exploration missions.