Abstract
The Taurus-Littrow valley on the Moon was the location of intensive geologic fieldwork during three days in December 1972. In situ activities at sampling stations were systematically documented by the astronauts using a series of overlapping images taken with their Hasselblad cameras. We investigated how this Apollo image archive can be used to perform 3-D reconstructions of several boulders of interest using close-range photogrammetry. We specifically focused on seven different boulders located at Stations 2, 6, and 7, at the foot of South and North Massifs, respectively. These boulders represent samples from highland materials, which rolled down the slopes of the surrounding hills. We used the Agisoft Metashape software to compute 3-D reconstructions of these boulders, using 173 scanned images as input. We then used either a web-based platform or a game engine to render the models in virtual reality. This allowed the users to walk around the boulders and to investigate in detail their morphology, fractures, vesicles, color variations, and sampling spots, as if standing directly in front of them with the astronauts. This work suggests that many features can be reconstructed in other sites of the Apollo missions, so as other robotic landing sites. Virtual reality techniques coupled to photogrammetry is thus opening a new era of exploration, both for past and future landing sites.
Highlights
The constant development of computer hardware and the availability since 2016 of technologically mature virtual reality (VR) headsets to the general public opens a new era of geological exploration
We focused on the reconstruction of the Apollo 17 lunar landing site, with a particular emphasis on the reproduction of the geological settings related to the melt-breccia contacts in boulders documented in photographs at Stations 6 and 7 at the foot of the North Massif in the Taurus-Littrow valley, and on boulders at Station 2 at the foot of the South Massif [8]
Further work using the 3-D scans of lunar samples themselves might allow in some cases to replace the samples directly in their exact position in VR, which might, for example, be useful for paleo magnetism studies that require the exact position of the sample to be of any relevance [8]
Summary
The constant development of computer hardware (notably graphic computing units used in game engines) and the availability since 2016 of technologically mature virtual reality (VR) headsets to the general public opens a new era of geological exploration. The use of simulated visual experience, commonly known as virtual reality, is quite an old concept [1], but the technique is only starting to become mature and progressively widespread in our community It can be coupled with the possibility of reconstructing high-resolution 3-D data sets, such as digital outcrop models (DOMs), from a set of overlapping photographs using structure-from-motion photogrammetry (e.g., [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]). VR allows the possibility of extracting and visualizing the scientific content of a set of images, and sharing the results with the community through web-based platforms or other digital systems, such as game engines, thanks to their optimized 3-D rendering capabilities [13,14] This new immersive technique potentially allows the users to explore 3-D reconstructions of planetary landscapes as if they were physically present “on the field”. The results of the 3-D reconstructions of the boulders are shared through a public web-based platform
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