Dielectric Properties of Lunar Materials at the Chang'e-4 Landing Site

On January 3rd 2019, the Chang'e-4 mission successfully landed in the Von Karman Crater inside the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin and achieved the first soft landing on the farside of the Moon. Lunar penetrating radar (LPR) equipped on the rover measured the shallow subsurface structure along the motion path for more than 700 m. LPR data could be used to obtain the dielectric properties of the materials beneath the exploration area, providing important clues as to the composition and source of the materials. Although the properties of the upper fine-grained regolith have been studied using various methods, the underlying coarse-grained materials still lack investigation. Therefore, this paper intends to estimate the loss tangent of the coarse-grained materials at depth ranges of ~12 and ~28 m. Stochastic media models with different rock distributions for the LPR finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation are built to evaluate the feasibility of the estimation method. Our results show that the average loss tangent value of coarse-grained materials is 0.0104 & PLUSMN;0.0027, and the abundance of FeOT+TiO2 is 20.08 wt.%, which is much higher than the overlying fine-grained regolith, indicating different sources.

Automated summary

This study investigates the coarse-grained materials on the farside of the Moon using LPR radar data, revealing an average loss tangent value of 0.0104±0.0027 and an abundance of FeOT+TiO2 at 20.08wt.%, significantly higher than the overlying fine-grained regolith.