A Spectral Library Study of Mixtures of Common Lunar Minerals and Glass

Abstract

Reflectance spectroscopy is a powerful tool to remotely identify the mineral and chemical compositions of the lunar regolith. The lunar soils contain silicate minerals with prominent absorption features and glasses with much less distinctive spectral features. The accuracy of mineral abundance retrieval may be affected by the presence of glasses. In this work, we construct a spectral library of mixtures of major lunar-type minerals and synthetic glasses with varying relative abundances and test their performance on mineral abundance retrievals. By matching the library spectra with the spectra of mineral mixtures with known abundances, we found that the accuracy of mineral abundance retrieval can be improved by including glass as an endmember. Although our method cannot identify the abundance of glasses quantitatively, the presence or absence of glasses in the mixtures can be decisively determined.