Spectral comparison of the Lunarregolith with characteristics of Apollo landing sites

Abstract

The spectral and compositional characteristics of lunar surface materials are knownfrom investigations of samples of the Apollo landing sites. Not all lunar surface units, however, can be reproduced by the landing site characteristics. This leads to the question where on the Moon and to which ectent lunar materials differfrom what is known from th landing sites. For this purpose we are restricted to remote sensing information and the only technique to identify the compositional content of materials is spectroscopy. A 12 color narrow band CCD survey of the Moon eas performed in order to characterize the VIS-NIR spectral characteristics of the nearside.From these data the spectral characteristics for each of the landing sites was derived and then applied to the whole data set in order to indentify areas which match these characateristics. once landing sites like regions are identified spectrally, unsampled regions can be mapped and spectrally classified. Even if we are not able to determine the composition of unsampled regions directly from the available spectral data, we are able to investigate the spectral differences between sampled and unsampled regions and thus constrain the composition of unsampled materials.