2023 Volume 1 Article ID: 20
We investigated obstacles (craters and boulders) at five long-term sunlit areas of the lunar south pole as candidate landing sites for future JAXA medium-sized landing demonstration missions to the Moon. We used resampled ortho-rectified images and digital elevation models of 1 m/pixel resolution, originally 4096 pixel / deg (7 m / pixel along meridian) resolution, based on data acquired by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and SELENE (Kaguya). The numbers of craters were found to be mostly 15–25 (> 7 m in crater diameter) in a 50-m-radius-circle, similar to that of the area around the Apollo 16 landing site. Almost no boulders exist at particularly high terrains (from the highest to about 10–20 m down) in each investigated region, where the longest illuminated conditions are expected, probably because the areas are so topographically high that boulders ejected by nearby crater formations did not reach the site.
