Polar Color Mosaic Production from Kaguya MI Data

Introduction: During up to 10 months of the actual observation period, SELENE (Kaguya) Multiband Imager (MI) has achieved over 3400 orbital observations that cover ~95% of the lunar surface. Due to the spacecraft's operation in polar orbit, the observation density of the MI increases toward the pole with significant numbers of repeated observations. The mosaic products from multiple observations (for each pixel) have a higher signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) and reduced color artifacts compared to the one from single observation. The preliminary product of MI north-polar mosaic from the repeated observations by [1] was successful but including systematic artifacts due to the low accuracy of spacecraft's position information. Recently [2] improved the Kaguya's SPK that will improve the coordinates of all the Kaguya observations. Minimizing the geographically mismatched images improves the S/N and photometric normalization by accurate calculations of incidence (i), emission (e), and phase (g) angles. Here we derived a new MI polar color mosaic using the new SPK and evaluated the accuracy of derived reflectance.