An improved radiative transfer model for estimating mineral abundance of immature and mature lunar soils

Abstract

An improved Hapke’s radiative transfer model (RTM) is presented to estimate mineral abundance for both immature and mature lunar soils from the Lunar Soil Characterization Consortium (LSCC) dataset. Fundamental to this improved Hapke’s model is the application of an alternative equation to describe the effects of larger size submicroscopic metallic iron (SMFe) (>50nm) in the interior of agglutinitic glass that mainly darken the host material, contrasting to the darkening and reddening effects of smaller size SMFe (<50nm) residing in the rims of mineral grains. Results from applying a nonlinear inversion procedure to the improved Hapke’s RTM show that the average mass fraction of smaller and larger size SMFe in lunar soils was estimated to be 0.30% and 0.31% respectively, and the particle size distribution of soil samples is all within their measured range. Based on the derived mass fraction of SMFe and particle size of the soil samples, abundances of end-member components composing lunar soil samples were derived via minimizing the difference between measured and calculated spectra. The root mean square error (RMSE) between the fitted and measured spectra is lower than 0.01 for highland samples and 0.005 for mare samples. This improved Hapke’s model accurately estimates abundances of agglutinitic glass (R-squared=0.88), pyroxene (R-squared=0.69) and plagioclase (R-squared=0.95) for all 57 samples used in this study including both immature and mature lunar soils. However, the improved Hapke’s RTM shows poor performance for quantifying abundances of olivine, ilmenite and volcanic glass. Improving the model performance for estimation of these three end-member components is the central focus for our future work.