The Chang'E‐3 lunar penetrating radar (LPR) observations at 500 MHz reveal four major stratigraphic zones from the surface to a depth of ~20 m along the survey line: a layered reworked zone (<1 m), an ejecta layer (~2–6 m), a paleoregolith layer (~4–11 m), and the underlying mare basalts. The reworked zone has two to five distinct layers and consists of surface regolith. The paleoregolith buried by the ejecta from a 500 m crater is relatively homogenous and contains only a few rocks. Population of buried rocks increases with depth to ~2 m at first, and then decreases with depth, representing a balance between initial deposition of the ejecta and later turnover of the regolith. Combining with the surface age, the LPR observations indicate a mean accumulation rate of about 5–10 m/Gyr for the surface regolith, which is at least 4–8 times larger than previous estimation.

Whether or not background secondary craters dominate populations of small impact craters on terrestrial bodies is a half‐century controversy. It has been suggested that small craters on some planetary bodies are dominated by background secondary craters based partly on the steepened slope of crater size‐frequency distribution (CSFD) toward small diameters, such as the less than ~1 km diameter crater population on the lunar mare. Here we show that topography degradation enlarges craters and increases CSFD slopes with time. When topography degradation is taken into account, for various‐aged crater populations, the observed steep CSFD at small diameters is uniformly consistent with an originally shallower CSFD, whose slope is undifferentiated from the CSFD slope estimated from near‐Earth objects and terrestrial bolides. The results show that the effect of topography degradation on CSFD is important in dating planetary surfaces, and the steepening of CSFD slopes is not necessarily caused by secondary cratering, but rather a natural consequence of topography degradation.

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The formation and structure of the Orientale basin on the Moon has been extensively studied in the past; however, estimates of its transient crater size, excavated volume and depth, and ejecta distribution remain uncertain. Here we present a new numerical model to reinvestigate the formation and structure of Orientale basin and better constrain impact parameters such as impactor size and velocity. Unlike previous models, the observed ejecta distribution and ejecta thickness were used as the primary constraints to estimate transient crater size—the best measure of impact energy. Models were also compared to basin morphology and morphometry, and subsurface structures derived from high‐resolution remote sensing observations and gravity data, respectively. The best fit model suggests a 100 km diameter impactor with a velocity of ~12 km s−1 formed the Orientale basin on a relatively “cold” Moon. In this impact scenario the transient crater diameter is ~400 km or 460 km depending on whether the crater is defined using the diameter of the excavation zone or the diameter of the growing cavity at the time of maximum crater volume, respectively. The volume of ejecta material is ~4.70 × 106 km3, in agreement with recent estimates of the Orientale ejecta blanket thickness from remote sensing studies. The model also confirms the remote sensing spectroscopic observations that no mantle material was excavated and deposited at Orientale's rim.