The lunar surface is a witness plate of events that happened in its journey through time. The landscape is the product of various processes that have been active on the Moon at different points in time. Studying the lunar surface, therefore, provides us insights into how it has evolved. Many times, this knowledge has impacted the understanding of our own Earth.
In this two-part talk, Deepak will briefly present examples of our learning of the Moon from its landscape and surface mineralogy. He will highlight the relevance of images as time capsules and mineralogy as an indicator of the processes at different spatial scales.
Christian will provide perspective on the learnings from the elemental composition of the lunar surface as well as how the surface texture is an important carrier of information for the processes happening on the Moon.
Deepak Dhingra is an associate professor at the Department of Earth Sciences at IIT Kanpur. He is a planetary geologist who uses spacecraft data to study the surfaces of planetary bodies. He specializes in the technique of reflectance spectroscopy of minerals and frequently integrates multiple datasets derived from various techniques to carry out his research. He has obtained his Bachelor's, Master's, and Ph.D. in Geology from Delhi University, IIT Roorkee, and Brown University, USA, respectively.
Christian Wöhler is a professor of image analysis at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of Dortmund University of Technology. His main scientific interests are in remote sensing, photogrammetry and computer vision, with applications in the fields of planetary science and exploration as well as in the industrial domain. He received his Diplom (equiv. to M.Sc.) in Physics from Würzburg University in 1996, the Doctorate degree in Computer Science from Bonn University in 2000, and the Habilitation (Venia Legendi) in Applied Computer Science from Bielefeld University in 2009. Besides academia, he has also worked as a senior research scientist in the Environment Perception department of Daimler Group Research and Advanced Engineering in Ulm.