Question

Analysis of polar
region​

Answer 1

Global environment change has caught the attention of many scientists around the world. The Arctic, Antarctic and Tibet Plateau are known as the three polar regions. They are the world's largest storage of cold and carbon which are the sensitive regions of global environment change. These three regions have significant impacts on the global environment change. It is extremely obvious that the environment change of these three regions is one of the major factors of global environment change. The special geographical positions of these three regions have great influence on the local climate and ecological environment that caused the climate is very bad and few people can get there, so there is very little observation data exists. In addition, these three regions have large scale and long-term observation characteristics. Since the meaning of remote sensing technology came out, we have developed airborne and space-borne Earth observation system. However, when taking three polar regions for researching, we will have to face the problems of temporal coherence and spatial continuity in the global scale, which challenges the Earth observation on the satellite and airborne platform. Moon is the unique natural satellite of the Earth, which always has one side facing it, with the advantages of large coverage, long-life platform, stable geological structure and multi-spheres three-dimensional detecting, turning out to be the ideal platform for observing three polar regions. At present and in the near future, the study of Earth observation data from a lunar observatory would be difficult to carry out, so a simulation is used in this paper to analyze the visibility of three polar regions. At first, we discuss the motion pattern of the Sun-Earth-Moon system. Then we construct a simulation system with simulated optical sensors setting up at different places on the Moon, finding that sunlight has great influence on optical observation. The visible region of a lunar-based optical sensor in a certain location is determined by the positions of the Sun, Earth and Moon, while the location of the sensor on the Moon is influenced by the spatial-temporal characteristics of the three polar regions that is designed to observe. The result shows that the lunar based Earth observation has advantages in wide swath, continuous observation and large effective coverage which contribute to the monitoring and understanding of three polar regions.