China's Chang' e-4 mission has carried out the first ever lunar farside landing exploration on the floor of the Von Karmen crater, a geologically complex region located in the most ancient and deepest South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin. In order to demonstrate the characteristics of materials in the landing area, we investigated the regional geochemistry and thickness of non-mare ejecta overlaying the mare basalts. Comparative analyses of FeO, TiO2 and Th concentrations suggest that the landing site surface is dominated by non-mare ejecta from nearby craters (e.g., Finsen crater) with part of basaltic materials. The ejecta thickness is estimated based on the excavation depth of dark-haloed and non-dark-haloed craters by using support-vector machine, a supervised machine learning method for classification. The results show that the ejecta thickness in the region of 40 km across the landing site varies from near zero to similar to 80 m with a mean value of similar to 41 m. The ejecta at the Chang' e-4 landing site is similar to 40 m thick, which is comparable to the in situ observations by the Lunar Penetrating Radar onboard the Yutu-2 rover. Our results provide valuable information for interpretation of the on-going returned data and geologic analysis of the Chang' e-4 exploration region.
Publication name |
ICARUS Volume: 359 Article Number: 114327 DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2021.114327 Published: MAY 1 2021 |
Author(s) |
Guo, Dijun; Fa, Wenzhe; Zeng, Xiaojia; Du, Jun; Liu, Jianzhong |
Corresponding author(s) |
GUO Dijun djguo@pku.edu.cn Peking Univ, Sch Earth & Space Sci, Inst Remote Sensing & Geog Informat Syst, Beijing, Peoples R China. Addresses: |
Author(s) from IGCAS |
ZENG Xiaojia; LIU Jianzhong | View here for the details
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