Abstract
In the remote detection of mineral compositions of planetary surface materials on airless bodies, space weathering is an obstacle which makes reflectance spectra redder and darker and weakens spectral features. This study attempts to model an effect of space weathering due to vapor coating by accounting for the change in surface reflectivity of regolith particles wherein nanophase-reduced iron (npFe0) particles are concentrated on their surfaces. When applied to a suite of reflectance spectra of lunar soils having different degrees of space weathering, this model can estimate the degrees of space weathering in terms of the thicknesses of the coating layer and provide an absorption coefficient spectrum of the host material.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Fischer, E. M., Quantitative compositional analysis of the lunar surface from reflectance spectroscopy: Iron, aluminum, and a model for removing the optical effects of space weathering, Ph.D. Thesis, 1995.
Fischer, E. M. and C. M. Pieters, Remote determination of exposure degree and iron concentration of lunar soils using Vis-NIR spectroscopic methods, Icarus, 111, 475–488, 1994.
Hapke, B., Bidirectional reflectance spectroscopy 1: Theory, J. Geophys. Res., 86, 3039–3054, 1981.
Hapke, B., Theory of Reflectance and Emittance Spectroscopy, Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 1993.
Hapke, B., Space weathering from Mercury to the asteroid belt, J. Geophys. Res., 106, 10039–10073, 2001.
Hiroi, T. and C. M. Pieters, Estimation of grain sizes and mixing ratios of fine powder mixtures of common geologic minerals, J. Geophys. Res., 99, 10867–10879, 1994.
Johnson, P. B. and R.W. Christy, Optical constants of transition metals: Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, and Pd, Phys. Rev. B, 9, 5056–5070, 1974.
Keller, L. P. and D. S. McKay, Discovery of vapor deposits in the lunar regolith, Science, 261, 1305–1307, 1993.
Keller, L. P. and D. S. McKay, The nature and origin of rims on lunar soil grains, Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta, 61, 2331–2341, 1997.
McKay, D. S., G. H. Heiken, A. Basu, G. Blanford, S. Simon, R. Reedy, B. M. French, and J. Papike, The lunar regolith, in The lunar sourcebook, edited by G. H. Heiken, D. T. Vaniman, and B. M. French, pp. 285–356, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1991.
Morris, R. V., Origin and evolution of the grain-size dependence of the concentration of fine-grained metal in lunar soils: The maturation of lunar soils to a steady-state stage, Lunar Planet Sci, 8, 3719–3747, 1977.
Noble, S. K., C. M. Pieters, and L. P. Keller, Can space weathering survive lithification? Results of a TEM study of lunar regolith breccia 10068, Lunar Planet. Sci., 33, no. 1334, 2002.
Pieters, C. M., E. M. Fischer, O. Rode, and A. Basu, Optical effects of space weathering: The role of the finest fraction, J. Geophys. Res., 98, 20817–20824, 1993.
Sasaki, S., K. Nakamura, Y. Hamabe, E. Kurahashi, and T. Hiroi, Production of iron nanoparticles by laser irradiation in a simulation of lunarlike space weathering, Nature, 410, 555–557, 2001.
Sunshine, J. M., C. M. Pieters, and S. F. Pratt, Deconvolution of mineral absorption bands: An improved approach, J. Geophys. Res., 95, 6955–6966, 1990.
Wentworth, S. J., L. P. Keller, D. S. McKay, and R. V. Morris, Space weathering on the moon: Patina on Apollo 17 samples 75075 and 76015, Meteorit. Planet. Sci., 34, 593–603, 1999.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Nimura, T., Hiroi, T. & Pieters, C.M. An improved scheme for modeling the reflectance spectra of space-weathered regoliths. Earth Planet Sp 60, 271–275 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1186/BF03352791
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/BF03352791