NASA presented a wonderful picture of the Shackleton crater (Shackleton), located at the south pole of the Moon. This place has never been accessible to the human eye. Eternal cold and eternal darkness reign there. The sun’s rays never illuminate its walls and bottom. To see the crater in all its glory, NASA combined images from two cameras: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s LROC and Danuri’s ShadowCam. Individually, none of them could show this magnificence.

The walls and floor of the crater were photographed with the ShadowCam camera, funded by NASA and installed on the South Korean Danuri satellite. The device was launched in August 2022 and began transmitting images of the Moon’s south pole towards the end of the year. ShadowCam’s sensitivity is approximately 200 times higher than other cameras armed with artificial lunar satellites. It can capture the reliefs of our satellite’s surface in places where the sun’s rays never penetrate. The camera captures well the illumination from surrounding hills and scattered light from the edges of craters on which sunlight falls. Light reflected from the earth also helps illuminate.

But such high sensitivity does not allow you to take pictures at the border between light and shadow. There is strong lighting in these places. So NASA combined images of the crater from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite, which takes images of well-lit lunar surfaces, and images from the ShadowCam camera, which takes images of shadowed areas. The result was a picture of the Moon’s topography that humans had never seen before.

And it’s not just beautiful. This area will be actively explored in the coming years, as water ice is promised to be found there. Ultimately, humans need to land on the south pole of the Moon and start establishing their bases there. Without planning and intelligence there will be no foundation.