The Moon's Permanently Shadowed Regions as Observed by LRO's Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) Instrument

Details The Moon's Permanently Shadowed Regions as Observed by LRO's Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) Instrument The Moon's Permanently Shadowed Regions as Observed by LRO's Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) Instrument

Dec 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufm.p12c..02g&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #P12C-02

Physics

[5422] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Ices, [5462] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Polar Regions, [5464] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Remote Sensing, [6250] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Moon

Scientific paper

Although of great interest for science and resource utilization, the Moon's permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) near each pole present difficult targets for remote sensing. The Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) instrument on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission is able to map PSRs at far-ultraviolet (FUV) wavelengths using two faint sources of illumination from the night sky: the all-sky Lyα glow produced as interplanetary medium (IPM) H atoms scatter the Sun's Lyα emissions, and the much fainter source from UV-bright stars. Since the reflected light from these two sources produces only a few hundred events per second in the photon-counting LAMP instrument, building maps with useful signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios requires the careful accumulation of the observations from thousands of individual LRO orbits. In this talk we present the latest FUV albedo maps obtained by LAMP of the Moon's southern and northern polar regions. The results show that 1) most PSR regions are darker at all FUV wavelengths, consistent with their surface soils having much larger porosities than non-PSR regions (e.g., P~0.9 or so), and 2) most PSRs are somewhat "redder" (i.e., more reflective at the longer FUV wavelengths) than non-PSR regions, consistent with the presence of ~1-2% water frost at the surface.

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