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Lunar Geology for Human Exploration
Lunar Geology for Human Exploration
I led a team with Azimuth's Harrison Spiller and Israel Olaoye from Kent State. Using EVNI and ERDAS, we produced a mineralogical survey of a section on the lunar surface.
Take away points
•There is an abundance of minerals on the moon.
•The exploration of these minerals will support the establishment of a human colony and manufacturing facilities.
•Further analysis will be done to quantify the minerals.
•Based on the current assessments, lunar settlements seem feasible.
A selection of previous research to understand the work already accomplished and used to formulate steps necessary for assessing the mineralogical composition of Lunar imagery.
Isaacson, P. J., Pieters, C. M., Besse, S., Clark, R. N., Head, J. W., Klima, R. L., ... & Taylor, L. A. (2011). Remote compositional analysis of lunar olivine‐rich lithologies with Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) spectra. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 116(E6).
Prettyman, T. H., Hagerty, J. J., Elphic, R. C., Feldman, W. C., Lawrence, D. J., McKinney, G. W., & Vaniman, D. T. (2006). Elemental composition of the lunar surface: Analysis of gamma-ray spectroscopy data from Lunar Prospector. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 111(E12).
Lucey, P. G., Blewett, D. T., & Hawke, B. R. (1998). Mapping the FeO and TiO2 content of the lunar surface with multispectral imagery. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 103(E2), 3679-3699.
Crown, D. A., & Pieters, C. M. (1987). Spectral properties of plagioclase and pyroxene mixtures and the interpretation of lunar soil spectra. Icarus, 72(3), 492-506.
Bielefeld, M. J., Reedy, R. C., Metzger, A. E., Trombka, J. I., & Arnold, J. R. (1976, April). Surface chemistry of selected lunar regions. In Lunar and Planetary Science Conference Proceedings (Vol. 7, pp. 2661-2676).
Lyon, R. J. P. (1963). Evaluation of infrared spectrophotometry for compositional analysis of lunar and planetary soils.
Albite (NaAlSi3O8)
High chemical variability occurs between Albite and Anorthite
Lunar plagioclase has less sodium compared to terrestrial plagioclase
Source: Papike, J., Taylor, L., & Simon, S. (1991). Lunar minerals. Lunar sourcebook: A user’s guide to the Moon, 121-181.
Augite - (Ca,Na)(Mg,Fe,Al,Ti)(Si,Al)2O6
Pyroxenes and Pigeonites are expected
Source: Isaacson, P. J., Sarbadhikari, A. B., Pieters, C. M., Klima, R. L., Hiroi, T., Liu, Y., & Taylor, L. A. (2011). The lunar rock and mineral characterization consortium: Deconstruction and integrated mineralogical, petrologic, and spectroscopic analyses of mare basalts. Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 46(2), 228-251.
Hematite - Fe2O3
While the moon is rich in iron-bearing rocks, it does not have liquid water and oxygen.
The oxygen is thought to have been transferred from the earth’s upper atmosphere via its magnetotail to the moon and reacted with the moon’s surface rocks to form hematite.
Source: Bhatt, M. U. (2012). Mineralogical analysis and iron abundance estimation of the Moon using the SIR-2 and other VIS-NIR spectrometers on-board the lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1 (Doctoral dissertation, Technische Universität Clausthal).
Future Work
•Image Processing is a complex task that requires numerous iterations.
•We desire to fine-tune our results to identify more minerals.
•Mineral quantification
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