Lunar polarisation
Over the last 7 years Andrew Fearnside, Chris Hooker and I have been working on a project to measure the polarisation of moonlight. The fact that moonlight is polarised has been known for nearly 100 years but interpreting what that means has always been difficult.
During this project we discovered that the polarisation can tell us about the refractive index of the moon rocks and hence provide important information about their composition.
This work was written and published in Icarus which is journal devoted to solar system studies. Here is a link to our paper:
Polarimetry of moonlight: A new method for determining the refractive index of the lunar regolith
There is description of the work on the Manchester University website
The image featured on the Manchester University site shows the refractive index of the Marius Hills region. Below you can see I have created an interactive 3D version of that image using X3D. The moon is actually pretty flat so I have exaggerated the vertical scale by a factor of 6.
Once the scene has loaded use the following to navigate
- left click and move to rotate about a pivot point
- double click to create a different pivot point for the whole scene
- scroll wheel to zoom
- ctrl plus left click drag to pan
A presentation on the project is here: