Date of Award

3-2017

Degree Name

MS in Electrical Engineering

Department/Program

Electrical Engineering

Advisor

John Saghri

Abstract

In August, 2014 three experiments were conducted using infrared systems deployed at White Mountain Research center, CA. The data was acquired for the whole month of August. Teams of 3-4 students from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and UC Santa Barbara were stationed at the research center for 2-3 days to operate the equipment. The three experiments were:(1) creating spatial-temporal time series of lunar surface temperatures;(2) identifying atmospheric meteor trails;(3) search for meteor impacts on the Moon surface. Out of the three this thesis focusses on experiment 1 and the results from this experiment could also help with the other experiments.

We propose to use a thermal infrared camera mounted on a telescope to acquire time-series observations of lunar surface temperatures to get a novel insight into the thermal evolution of the Moon over a complete lunar cycle. Half a lunar cycle would account from morning to night and lasts for approximately 14.75 days. Seeing how the pixel value changes from morning to night the pixel and temperature trends can be observed throughout the day. Apart from that one can get the two temperature peaks that could maybe help to get an estimate for the Thermal inertia of the surface in the presence of Moon regolith. The temperature trends and the thermal inertia could potentially provide some insight for methods that seek to determine the properties of asteroids from ground based observations.

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