Preserve a mission after its final signal

Kaguya’s main orbiter ended its observations through a controlled impact near Gill crater. JAXA’s English notice records 18:25 on June 10, 2009 in GMT; the Japanese record gives about 03:25 on June 11 in Japan. These describe the same event across a nine-hour time difference. Reporting a date without its time basis can create a false disagreement.

Okina had already impacted the Moon in February 2009. Ouna’s transmissions ended on June 29, rather than in the main orbiter’s impact. The 2017 ISAS review explicitly distinguishes Ouna’s radio shutdown from a controlled impact. A program timeline should attach each event to the correct spacecraft and should not infer the present condition of an object from a historical operational statement.

The mission’s observations remain accessible through JAXA’s DARTS archive. A terrain image, a numerical elevation grid and a wavelength-dependent measurement may cover the same region while containing different quantities. Select a product for the question being asked rather than assuming that the largest downloadable file is the best answer.

DARTS explains that a PDS3 image file is paired with a label describing how to read it. Dimensions, sample type and other metadata determine how stored numbers become meaningful values. Displaying an elevation grid as grayscale does not make it a camera photograph. Preserve the product identifier, version, units and geographic reference so another reader can understand or repeat the comparison.

Later researchers combined Kaguya observations with new mission data and used its maps to examine lunar geology and help evaluate exploration sites. A mission can stop collecting measurements while its archive continues supporting new questions. That is why maintaining usable data and documentation is part of scientific value, not merely an administrative afterthought.

In an original map-comparison exercise, one grid has twice as many pixels as another because software interpolated it. The new grid can be convenient for display, but it has not gained new independent observations or automatically resolved smaller hazards. Likewise, a ten-kilometer-wide crater crossing one thousand twenty-meter pixels would be a warning to check scale: that pixel count spans twenty kilometers. Units and processing history are practical tools for catching plausible-looking mistakes.

More display cells do not create new observations