Geological mapping and chronology of lunar landing sites: Apollo 12

Abstract

The lunar cratering chronology is fundamentally important, because it is not just used to determine ages for unsampled lunar surfaces, but is commonly applied to other planetary bodies. As part of a systematic study of the calibration of the lunar cratering chronology at the Apollo landing sites, we produced a new detailed geological map of the Apollo 12 landing site, using recent orbital data including Lunar Reconnaissance orbiter (LRO) Narrow Angle (NAC) and Wide Angle (WAC) images, and a Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA)/SELENE merged digital elevation model (DEM), as well as Chandrayaan M3 spectral data. Using high-resolution LRO NAC images and NAC-derived DTMs, new crater size-frequency distributions (CSFDs) were measured on the updated geological units to determine crater retention ages or N(1) values (i.e., the cumulative number of craters with diameters ≥1 km). Since the Apollo 12 landing site is located in Oceanus Procellarum on a ray of Copernicus crater, it provides two possible calibration points for the lunar cratering chronology: (1) a mare basalt surface age, and (2) an approximate age for Copernicus crater via its ray material. We calibrated our new N(1) values with recently determined radiometric ages of Apollo 12 basalt samples, and compare our results with work done by Hiesinger et al. (2012) for Copernicus crater, and the Neukum (1983) chronology. The updated calibration points are consistent with the lunar chronology of Neukum (1983), which indicates that no updates to this function are currently necessary.