Mineral Abundances Inferred From In Situ Reflectance Measurements of Chang'E‐4 Landing Site in South Pole‐Aitken Basin

During its first two lunar day measurements, the visible and near‐infrared spectrometer on board the Yutu‐2 Rover of the Chang'E‐4 mission acquired six in situ reflectance spectra from the floor of Von Kármán crater within the South Pole‐Aitken basin. A spectral lookup table search has shown th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geophysical research letters 2019-08, Vol.46 (16), p.9439-9447
Main Authors: Hu, Xiaoyi, Ma, Pei, Yang, Yazhou, Zhu, Meng‐Hua, Jiang, Te, Lucey, Paul G., Sun, Lingzhi, Zhang, Hao, Li, Chunlai, Xu, Rui, He, Zhiping, Lin, Hongyu, Huang, Changning, Sun, Yuxue
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abundance
Composition
Correlation analysis
Craters
Infrared spectrometers
Lookup tables
Lunar far side
Lunar landing
lunar minerals
lunar science
Mapping
Mineral composition
Mineralogy
Moon
Olivine
Plagioclase
Principal components analysis
Reflectance
reflectance spectroscopy
Regolith
Relative abundance
remote sensing
Soft landing
South Pole
South Pole‐Aitken basin
Spectra
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Summary:During its first two lunar day measurements, the visible and near‐infrared spectrometer on board the Yutu‐2 Rover of the Chang'E‐4 mission acquired six in situ reflectance spectra from the floor of Von Kármán crater within the South Pole‐Aitken basin. A spectral lookup table search has shown that the regolith at the landing site contains 56–72% plagioclase, 9–28% orthopyroxene, 4–19% clinopyroxene, and 2–12% olivine, in relative abundance, in agreement with the results from Kaguya Multiband Imager mineral mapping. A mineral composition analysis using measurements made by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper and the Multiband Imager has shown that the surface materials of the landing site may have been ejected from the nearby Finsen crater. This result is also supported by principal component analysis which shows a strong correlation between the compositions of the landing area and Finsen crater. Plain Language Summary With its successful soft landing in South Pole‐Aitken basin on the lunar far side, the Chang'E‐4 mission measured six reflectance spectra during the first two lunar days. With these measurements, we obtained the mineral compositions of the landing site and identified the possible source location of regolith materials at the landing site, which may help us to uncover the mysteries of the formation of the South Pole‐Aitken basin. Key Points We report the in situ visible‐near‐infrared reflectance spectra measured by Chang'E‐4 during the first two lunar days We obtained the relative mineral abundances at the landing site by using a spectral lookup table The surface materials of the Chang'E‐4 landing site are plagioclase rich and may have come from the nearby Finsen crater
ISSN:0094-8276
1944-8007
DOI:10.1029/2019GL084531