Retrieving water ice abundance in representative regions of the Moon's South Pole using topography corrected SELENE MI images

Lunar south polar region Water ice SELENE MI image Spectral analysis
["Long, Xindi","Wang, Chao","Sanlang, Siji","Feng, Yongjiu","Xu, Xiong","Xie, Huan","Tong, Xiaohua"] 2025-07-30 期刊论文
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Previous studies have reported the existence of water ice in the lunar polar regions, but estimations of water ice using different methods vary in certainty, precision, location, and abundance. Spectral analysis is one of the major ways for estimating lunar water ice abundance. However, low spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio are the disadvantages of hyperspectral images. In this study, the images captured by the multi-band imager (MI), characterized by higher spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio than hyperspectral images, onboard the Japanese Moon orbiter Selenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE), are used to retrieve water ice in lunar polar regions. We analyzed reflectance in near-infrared bands after topographic correction to reduce the misinterpretation of the properties of the lunar surface. Through qualitative spectral analysis and quantitative water ice retrieval, the water ice abundance of sunlit areas in Shackleton Crater, de Gerlache Rims 1 and 2, Connecting Ridge, Connecting Ridge extension, and Peak Near Shackleton are obtained. The sunlit inner wall of Shackleton Crater has the highest possibility to contain water ice among the four regions, the estimated abundance ranges from 2 to 3 wt.%, which is consistent with previous studies in terms of order of magnitude. Reproducibility test suggests that the parallax effect of MI is small to ensure robust conclusions. When artificial noise was introduced, water ice abundance variations were limited to 1 wt.% in only a few areas, revealing that the results exhibit robustness against noise interference.
来源平台:GEOSCIENCE LETTERS