Mao Ye

Understanding the Moon’s internal structure through moonquake observations and remote sensing technologies

Explorations for the interior structure of the Moon mainly involve three technologies: the early gravitational observations via circumlunar satellites, the moonquake observations during the Apollo period, and the recent high-resolution remote sensing observations. Based on these technologies, we divided the development of the moon’s interior structure into three stages. The first stage is the discovery of high-density anomalous masses (mascons) on the lunar surface with the low-order gravitational field models, which were obtained by observing perturbations of the early lunar orbital satellites. The second stage is the preliminary understanding of the layer structure with the help of moonquake observations during the Apollo period. The third stage is the deep understanding of the structure of the lunar crust, mantle, and core, with the use of high-resolution remote sensing data and the reassessment of moonquake data from the Apollo’s mission. This paper gave detailed introduction and comments on different observation technologies, gathered data, and data processing techniques used at the three stages. In addition, this paper analyzed the current issues in the researches on the Moon’s internal structure and discussed the prospects for future explorations.

An Improved Digital Elevation Model of the Lunar Mons Rümker Region Based on Multisource Altimeter Data

Mons Rumker is the primary candidate region for the lunar landing mission of ChangE-5. We propose a data processing method that combines multisource altimeter data and we developed an improved digital elevation model (DEM) of the Mons Rumker region with a horizontal resolution of 256 pixels per degree. The lunar orbiter laser altimeter (LOLA) onboard the lunar reconnaissance orbiter (LRO) acquired 884 valid orbital benchmark data with a high precision. A special crossover adjustment of 156 orbital profiles from the ChangE-1 laser altimeter (LAM) and 149 orbital profiles from the SELenological and ENgineering Explorer (SELENE) laser altimeter (LALT) was applied. The radial residual root mean square (RMS) of the LAM was reduced from 154.83 ± 43.60 m to 14.29 ± 27.84 m and that of the LALT was decreased from 3.50 ± 5.0 m to 2.75 ± 4.4 m. We used the adjusted LAM and LALT data to fill the LOLA gaps and created the merged LOLA + LAM and LOLA + LALT DEMs. The merged LOLA + LAM DEM showed distortions because of the horizontal geolocation errors in the LAM data. The merged LOLA + LALT DEM was closer to the ground truth than the LOLA-only DEM when validated with the images of the LRO camera (LROC).