Morphological analysis of polar landing regions for a solar powered ice drilling mission

• Published in: Icarus (New York, N.Y. 1962) N.Y. 1962), 2024-03, Vol.411, p.115927, Article 115927
• Main Authors: Tomka, R., Steinmann, V., Warren, T., Kereszturi, A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Craters; Moon; Polar
• ISSN: 0019-1035; 1090-2643
• DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2023.115927

Planning of mission toward the lunar polar region is supported here by the analysis and better understanding of the most frequent landforms: craters on the Moon in the polar region between 79.30 and 84.35 southern latitude. This work surveys impact crater morphologies and spatial density based age estimation and slopes for eight earlier selected, large candidate landing regions of the Luna-27 solar powered ice drilling mission at the southern lunar polar region. The morphological, morphometrical, slope and dating analysis provided the following results: The d/D values of craters follow the earlier found d/D trend for larger craters, but there is a scatter in depth values related to the ageing of craters. The occurrence of shallow craters looks to be somewhat more abundant here than at lower lunar latitudes, in agreement with Mahanti et al. (2015). Beside fresh craters, rock boulders also occur at some km sized local topographic elevations, indicating erosion of ∼1 m thick regolith layer by micro-scale impacts roughly on the scale of 100 Ma. Characteristic temporal sequence of change in the morphology of about 100 m-sized craters confirmed earlier results. The sequence starts from the freshest craters, with mass wasting produced stripes in the interior slope, later diminish of high-reflectance proximal ejecta happens, then boulders, and even later elevated rims diminish. The surveyed large terrains showed crater statistics-derived model ages ranged between 3.9 and 4.2 Ga, indicating below a thin pulverised surface regolith layer, the topography of the poorly fragmented bedrock below it still holds the Late Heavy Bombardment aged basement. The equilibrium crater population was possibly identified below the 100–200 m diameter range. Surveying crater retention at >30° slopes indicates exposure of 78–140 Ma for steep terrains, and 330–150 Ma for flat