Numerical simulation of effective solar irradiance and temperatures at simple crater of lunar dayside

Abstract

Solar radiation plays an important part in lunar surface thermal environment. The topographic effect was usually ignored in previous work, which might cause great uncertainties in surface temperature simulation. To better understand the surface temperatures of the craters at any time and on any location of the Moon, we simulated the effective solar irradiance and temperatures of the Banting crater as an example. In this work, we firstly constructed a three-dimensional Banting crater (16.4$^\\circ$E, 26.6$^\\circ$N) model based on the elevation data obtained from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter onboard Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), and then calculated the distribution of the effective solar irradiance at different local times. In addition, we calculated the distribution of percentage of illuminated area of the Banting-like craters at any day time and on all locations of the Moon. These results show that the craters located within 48.2$^\\circ$N/S and at the time of 08:48–15:12 are illuminated without any self-shading, while that located at high latitudes or near to dawn/dusk endure different degrees of the self-shading effect. Finally, we simulated the temperatures of the Banting crater at different local times based on the surface radiation balance. Compared to the temperatures measured by Diviner aboard LRO, the results show that the simulated temperatures are well consistent with the Diviner observations, which verified our models and simulation results.