The Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been mapping the temperature of the lunar surface since 5 July 2009. Past Diviner data has been used to produce global maps of nighttime temperature and to determine the thermal properties of the surface. However, the most recently published global maps only used data collected from 2009 to 2016. We recreate these global maps using all data available through July 2022: over 5 years of additional data. We implement several improvements, including a correction for errors in instrument pointing, which result in an increase in effective resolution of ∼3.5× and ∼1.3× in the longitudinal and latitudinal directions, respectively. This allows lateral brightness temperature variations to be resolved at a finer scale than was previously possible. In addition, we develop a model that mostly removes the effect of topography on nighttime temperatures. The resulting maps better highlight differences in temperature that are caused by variations in the thermal properties of the surface.

Irregular mare patches (IMPs) are small volcanic features in the lunar maria that appear geologically young compared with the surrounding maria in which they reside. The first IMP was discovered in the Apollo 15 panoramic camera images of the Lacus Felicitatis area (Whitaker, 1972). This IMP (named Ina; Figure 1a) stood out from the surrounding maria because of its unique "D" shape, the "blob-like" smooth mounds surrounded by uneven reflective material in its interior, and its lack of small impact craters. Since its discovery, more than 70 similar features have been found in Apollo images and with the more recent Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC;Braden et al., 2014;. Around 70% of the IMPs cataloged by Braden et al. (2014) are found in northwestern Mare Tranquillitatis or near the impact craters Gruithuisen E and M, and their morphologic features and low number of impact craters led Braden et al. ( 2014) to conclude

Inconsistencies in crater distributions in and around lunar craters (e.g., different superposed crater distributions observed in counts on ejecta vs. counts on crater floors or melt ponds for the same large crater; and additionally, spatial variations within ejecta counts) were observed in early work (