One Moon, many measurements 2: Photometric corrections

Abstract

Observations of the lunar surface within the past 10years have been made with various lunar remote sensing instruments, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) onboard the Chandrayaan-1 mission, the Spectral Profiler (SP), the Multiband Imager (MI), the Terrain Camera (TC) onboard the SELENE mission, and the ground based USGS Robotic Lunar Observatory (ROLO) for some of them. The lunar phase functions derived from these datasets, which are used in the photometric modeling to correct for the various illumination conditions of the data, are compared to assess their differences and similarity in order to improve interpretations of lunar surface spectra. The phase functions are found to be similar across various phase angles except in the 0–20° range. Differences across the 0–20° range likely result from two different inputs in the photometric modeling of the M3 and SP data: (1) M3 has larger emission angles due to the characteristics of the instrument and the attitude of the spacecraft, and (2) M3 viewing geometry was derived from the local topography whereas SP used a spherical Moon (no topography). The combination of these two different inputs affects the phase function at small phase angles where shadows play a more substantial role, with spatial resolution differences between M3 and SP being another possible source for the differences. SP data are found to be redder (i.e., steeper slope with increasing wavelengths) than MI, M3 and ROLO. Finally, the M3 overall reflectance is also found to be lower than that the other instruments (i.e., MI, SP, and ROLO), generally at least 10% darker than MI. These differences can be observed at local scales in specific examples at hundreds of meters resolutions. At regional and global scales, the same differences are found, which demonstrates the overall stability of the various datasets. The observations from M3, TC, SP and MI are very stable and agree well; however caution should be used when making interpretations based on the spectral slope of SP data or on the absolute reflectance of M3 data.