Improved Rock Abundance and Lunar Nighttime Temperature Maps From Diviner

Thermophysical Properties of Lunar Irregular Mare Patches From LRO Diviner Radiometer Data

“…Mass wasting could cause rocks from the wall to roll onto the units in the depression (see e.g., Elder et al., 2017, Figure 3), and, as mentioned previously, a greater abundance of small rocks can result in a lower H‐parameter. It is also likely that radiative heating from the warmer surrounding rocky pit walls results in the pit floor units staying warmer throughout the night, as is shown to occur at the floors of impact craters and at rilles (Bandfield et al., 2011; Powell et al., 2022). While this would not affect the ability to constrain RA using anisothermality (Bandfield et al., 2011), it could yield elevated regolith temperatures.…”

“…This means that the depression walls take up a larger portion of the local FOV and therefore contribute a larger amount of additional radiation to the IMP units on the floor of Sosigenes. Future thermal modeling efforts (e.g., Powell et al., 2022) could better constrain the thermophysical properties of IMPs on the floors of depressions by calculating the radiative heating from surrounding walls using a high‐resolution digital terrain model.…”

“…We binned the data at 128 ppd spatial resolution and 0.1‐hr local time resolution for eight of the largest lunar IMPs to create local area maps of Ina, Sosigenes, Cauchy‐5, Maskelyne, Nubium, Ross‐E‐1, Maclear‐2, and Arago‐5 (listed in Table 1). Recent work has been performed by members of the Diviner team to update instrument pointing correction offsets, thereby improving the quality and sharpness of the Diviner data (Powell et al., 2022). We have built upon the work of Elder et al.…”

“…Recent work has been performed by members of the Diviner team to update instrument pointing correction offsets, thereby improving the quality and sharpness of the Diviner data (Powell et al, 2022). We have built upon the work of Elder et al (2017) by applying these pointing corrections, along with making use of the ∼4 years of additional data that have been collected since the previous study.…”