Major elements and Mg# of the Moon: Results from Chang’E-1 Interference Imaging Spectrometer (IIM) data

Abstract

Major elements such as Fe, Ti, Mg, Al, Ca, and Si play very important roles in understanding the origin and evolution of the Moon. Up to now there are still no high resolution maps for all the six major elements and Mg# showing their abundances and distributions. The objective of this paper is to introduce the techniques and results to create high resolution maps of the six major elements with Chang’E-1 Interference Imaging Spectrometer (IIM) data. The elemental contents of returned soils and feldspathic lunar meteorites are used as ground truth and correlated with the reflectance of the landing sites and northern farside highlands extracted from Chang’E-1 IIM data. The relationships linking geochemical information and optical data are established with empirical methods. The final maps of the abundances of the six major oxides are produced with the modified partial least squares regression (PLSR) model at a spatial resolution of 200m/pixel at the equator. Finally some implications (for example, producing the high resolution map of Mg#; identifying the crustal heterogeneity of lunar highlands; helping to search for HA basalts; assessing the average elemental abundances of each terrane and the whole Moon) of these new maps are shown.