Mapping Landslides in Lunar Impact Craters Using Chebyshev Polynomials and Dem’s

Abstract

Commission VI, WG VI/1 KEY WORDS: Planetary mapping, Impact craters, Landslides, Chebyshev polynomials ABSTRACT:Geological slope failure processes have been observed on the Moon surface for decades, nevertheless a detailed and exhaustive lunar landslide inventory has not been produced yet. For a preliminary survey, WAC images and DEM maps from LROC at 100 m/pixels have been exploited in combination with the criteria applied by Brunetti et al. (2015) to detect the landslides. These criteria are based on the visual analysis of optical images to recognize mass wasting features. In the literature, Chebyshev polynomials have been applied to interpolate crater cross-sections in order to obtain a parametric characterization useful for classification into different morphological shapes. Here a new implementation of Chebyshev polynomial approximation is proposed, taking into account some statistical testing of the results obtained during Least-squares estimation. The presence of landslides in lunar craters is then investigated by analyzing the absolute values off odd coefficients of estimated Chebyshev polynomials. A case study on the Cassini A crater has demonstrated the key-points of the proposed methodology and outlined the required future development to carry out.

Recognition of landslides in lunar impact craters

“…The high RMSE value could be related to the short-length dunes (red circles) previously detected as well in other craters (e.g. Yordanov et al (2016)). An increasing of the number of craters' profiles extracted from the DEM could improve the results and eliminate errors similar to the above discussed.…”

“…Testing the size or the statistical significance of the odd coefficients should theoretically be a direct way to detect symmetry. After a few experiments already reported in Yordanov et al (2016), the analysis of odd coefficients did not provide satisfying results. This was due to the presence of noise and other local effects in the inner crater topography, which may have caused the odd coefficients to be significantly different from zero even in the case a slump was not present.…”

“…Following the results discussed in Mahanti et al (2014), coefficients up to order M = 16 are enough for the characterization of the crater morphology. Details about this stage can be found in Yordanov et al (2016), as well as reports about statistical testing to assess the quality of the interpolation.…”

The ‘Moon Mapping’ Project to Promote Cooperation Between Students of Italy and China

“…Here the analysis of odd coefficients of Chebyshev polynomials has been applied to detect asymmetries in the crater profile. The concept that is pursued in this subtopic is to recognize landslides by analyzing the discrepancy between the actual crater cross-sectional profiles and the theoretical ones (Yordanov et al, 2016). Four cross-sections are considered per each crater.…”