This archive contains digital elevation models (DEMs) of the lunar south pole.  SOUTH_POLE_MOSAIC.IMG is a map of a region approximately 1200 x 300 km in area at the lunar south pole. Elevation data at 200 pixels per degree of latitude (~150 m spatial resolution) were obtained with radar interferometry from the Goldstone Solar System Radar in October 1997, as described in MARGOTETAL2000. Delay-Doppler radar images were converted to latitude and longitude using the lunar spin state and prime meridian as specified by the DE405 planetary ephemeris. Elevations are given in meters with respect to a 1737.4 km sphere. Absolute elevations were obtained by comparison with Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter laser altimetry data (LOLA, NEUMANN2010); a single elevation offset was applied to the radar DEM to minimize (in a least square sense) the differences in elevations with ~300,000 LOLA RDR points throughout the region. We checked for horizontal offsets between the LOLA points, which were produced using the DE421 ephemeris; the two datasets match horizontally to <100 m. No corrections for large-scale slopes in the elevation offsets were applied. Geocoding corrections have not been applied to this data set, so residual errors due to foreshortening remain, with the largest errors (300 m) in areas with elevations farthest from the 1737.4 km reference radius. The median geocoding error is ~100 m. Elevation errors due to noise in the interferometric phase estimates are also of order 100 m. In small, isolated areas (<1% of the map), larger errors due to incorrect phase unwrapping remain. The DEM is formatted as a 8000 x 2000 array in a polar stereographic projection, with the south pole at (x,y) : (4000.5,900.5) (one-based convention). Each cell contains either an elevation measurement or a null value (set to -25000 m). Null values represent areas that were either shadowed from the radar, provided too weak an echo for a reliable elevation measurement, were not simply connected to the rest of the map, or where the data are simply missing.

This data set underwent external peer review from January to April 2012.