The production of the Clementine HiRes maps used machine vision software, developed by MSSS, that automatically located and correlated the vast majority of the images.

This dataset, which fills 22 CD-ROMs, provides a factor of five improvement in the detail that can be seen over significant sections of the lunar surface, and includes nearly complete coverage of the polar regions. It is an exciting new tool for lunar geology, and provides a context for interpreting other datasets such as the recent polar ice results from the Lunar Prospector Mission.

"We completely broke the paradigm of manual mosaicking as it has been done on past planetary image datasets," said Jeff Warren, MSSS lead on the Clementine HiRes Map effort. "It would have been impossible to mosaic these two hundred thousand images manually on anything approaching the timescale or cost we achieved with Clementine."

The Clementine HiRes maps were produced by spatially registering each HiRes image to the photometrically-calibrated United States Geological Survey (USGS) digital basemaps issued in 1997.

The USGS maps cover the entire Moon at a resolution of 100 to 150 meters per pixel using images from Clementine's Ultraviolet/Visible camera. A total of 187,526 raw HiRes images were used in these mosaics: 86% for the sub-polar mosaics and 14% for the polar mosaics.

Nearly twice this number of HiRes images were excluded from the maps because of poor exposure or camera pointing. The HiRes maps cover about 8% of the lunar surface at 20 to 30 meters per pixel resolution, which is five times higher resolution than the USGS basemap.

The HiRes map coverage near the poles is extensive. The colors depict data from the Lunar Prospector Mission neutron spectrometer. Colors indicates low neutron counts, interpreted to be locations of ice - lavender signifies some lowering of neutrons, blue the least neutrons.

The bulk of the CD-ROMS (18) covers the sub-polar regions below 80 degrees latitude at a scale of 20 meters/pixel in the sinusoidal map projection. The remaining 4 CDs cover the north and south poles with 30 meter/pixel scale in the stereographic map projection. Two CDs are devoted to each pole, one representing images acquired when the spacecraft was closest to the moon's south pole, and the other when the spacecraft was closer to the north pole.

The MSSS Clementine HiRes maps will be available on-line and on CD-ROM from the NASA Planetary Data System in the third quarter of 1999. Until then, the South Polar disk CL_6021 is available on the MSSS site.