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As the Moon heads into southern summer the region around the south pole is better seen by LROC. One of the many goals of the LRO mission is to improve cartographic knowledge of the Moon. The location of the pole shown here (image 1600 meters wide) may be in error by several hundred meters, wait a year for an update!

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center built and manages the mission for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera was designed to acquire data for landing site certification and to conduct polar illumination studies and global mapping. Operated by Arizona State University, the LROC facility is part of the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE). LROC consists of a pair of narrow-angle cameras (NAC) and a single wide-angle camera (WAC). The mission is expected to return over 70 terabytes of image data.