Abstract

Lunar laser altimeter (LALT) has been developed for the Japanese lunar exploration SELENE (SELenological and ENgineering Explorer) in 2003. Lunar laser altimetry and two other selenodetic missions are put together and called RISE (Researches In SElenodesy) project that has been developed mainly by National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Main objective of this measurements is to construct a more global and accurate topographic model of the moon than Clementine's GLTM-2. The newly developed topography of the moon will make a great contribution to many problems of lunar geology, geophysics, and the reduction of lunar occultation data. In order to expand the coverage in latitude, LALT has a function of slant ranging in the direction about 40 degrees aside from nadir. LALT is designed to have a capability of detecting most of returned pulses from the lunar surface even for the slant ranging with proper threshold level.

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