Lunar polar craters - icy, rough or just sloping?

Eke, V.R.; Bartram, S.A.; Lane, D.A.; Smith, D.; Teodoro, L.F.A.

doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2014.06.021

Lunar polar craters - icy, rough or just sloping?

Eke, V.R.; Bartram, S.A.; Lane, D.A.; Smith, D.; Teodoro, L.F.A.

Authors

Dr Vincent Eke v.r.eke@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

S.A. Bartram

D.A. Lane

D. Smith

L.F.A. Teodoro

Abstract

Circular Polarisation Ratio (CPR) mosaics from Mini-SAR on Chandrayaan-1 and Mini-RF on LRO are used to study craters near to the lunar north pole. The look direction of the detectors strongly affects the appearance of the crater CPR maps. Rectifying the mosaics to account for parallax also significantly changes the CPR maps of the crater interiors. It is shown that the CPRs of crater interiors in unrectified maps are biased to larger values than crater exteriors, because of a combination of the effects of parallax and incidence angle. Using the LOLA Digital Elevation Map (DEM), the variation of CPR with angle of incidence has been studied. For fresh craters, CPR ∼0.7∼0.7 with only a weak dependence on angle of incidence or position interior or just exterior to the crater, consistent with dihedral scattering from blocky surface roughness. For anomalous craters, the CPR interior to the crater increases with both incidence angle and distance from the crater centre. Central crater CPRs are similar to those in the crater exteriors. CPR does not appear to correlate with temperature within craters. Furthermore, the anomalous polar craters have diameter-to-depth ratios that are lower than those of typical polar craters. These results strongly suggest that the high CPR values in anomalous polar craters are not providing evidence of significant volumes of water ice. Rather, anomalous craters are of intermediate age, and maintain sufficiently steep sides that sufficient regolith does not cover all rough surfaces.

Citation

Eke, V., Bartram, S., Lane, D., Smith, D., & Teodoro, L. (2014). Lunar polar craters - icy, rough or just sloping?. Icarus, 241, 66-78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2014.06.021

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jun 16, 2014
Online Publication Date	Jun 30, 2014
Publication Date	Oct 1, 2014
Deposit Date	Jul 16, 2014
Publicly Available Date	Jul 17, 2014
Journal	Icarus
Print ISSN	0019-1035
Publisher	Elsevier
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	241
Pages	66-78
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2014.06.021
Keywords	Moon, Surface, Radar observations, Ices.
Public URL	https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1447515

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Copyright Statement
NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Icarus. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Icarus, 241, 2014, 10.1016/j.icarus.2014.06.021.