Lunar soil characterization consortium analyses: Pyroxene and maturity estimates derived from Clementine image data

The mineralogy of a planetary surface is a diagnostic product of its formation and geologic evolution. Global assessment of lunar mineralogy at high spatial resolution has been a long standing goal of lunar exploration. Currently, the only global data available for such study is multispectral imagery from the Clementine mission. We use the detailed compositional, petrographic, and spectroscopic data of lunar soils produced by the Lunar Soil Characterization Consortium to explore the use of multispectral imaging as a diagnostic tool. We compare several statistically optimized formulations of links between spectral and mineral parameters and apply them to Clementine UV–VIS data. The most reliable results are for estimations of pyroxene abundance and maturity parameters (agglutinate abundance, Is/FeO). Estimations of different pyroxene composition (low-Ca versus high-Ca) appear good in a relative sense, but absolute values are limited by residual wavelength dependent Clementine photometric calibrations. Since the signal-to-noise of Clementine multispectral data is good at the 1-km scale, almost any combination of parameters that capture inherent spectral variance can provide spatially coherent maps, although the parameters may not actually be directly related to composition. Clementine estimates are useful for identifying scientific or exploration targets for imaging spectrometer sensors of the next generation that are specifically designed to characterize mineralogy.