Shackleton connecting ridge
Ridge between Shackleton and de Gerlache craters, lunar south pole · 89.5017°S 135.2065°W
What this scene is
A 1 km patch of the ridge that links Shackleton and de Gerlache craters, one of the best-lit places near the south pole and a candidate Artemis landing region. The Sun never rises more than a couple of degrees here. Heights from an LROC NAC stereo model at 3.5 m.
1 km across, heights every 3.5 m, 329 m from lowest to highest point. 20% of the ground is steeper than 20°.
How close to the real Moon
- Against LOLA laser heights (5 m grid, 38,749 points): mean difference -1.0 m, spread 0.8 m RMS. The stereo model is tied to LOLA, so the mean is not an independent check; the spread is.
- Hills beyond the scene come from coarser elevation data reaching 40–56 km out; anything farther away cannot cast a shadow here.
- Light and dark ground is missing (uniform albedo).
- 1.7 % of cells had no stereo height and were filled from their nearest neighbour.
- The browser exposes the view like a camera metering the sunlit ground, so on-screen brightness shows light and shadow, not absolute brightness.
Use it for your robot
Download the heightmap, albedo and 3D model above. For labelled training images of this place under any Sun, with depth, shadow and hazard masks, we render a dataset with the same terrain.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University (LROC); NASA GSFC LOLA team; NAIF SPICE. Method: docs/science/sim-scenes.md.