Brightness Temperature Calculation of Lunar Crater: Interpretation of Topographic Effect on Microwave Data From Chang'E

Abstract

In order to quantitatively interpret topographic effect on Chang'E (CE) microwave data, a detailed method to compute brightness temperature (TB) over a lunar crater is proposed, which incorporated the effect of surface tilts. The method improves the effective solar irradiance model of the lunar surface to obtain the temperature profile of the lunar crater. The calculated TB at 37 GHz with the proposed computation method, which is based on three digital elevation models (DEMs) from different sources, are consistent with the observed TB from the CE-2 microwave radiometer. The simulated behavior of TB across crater Hercules reproduces the TB undulation observed by CE in a single swath. TB is significantly affected by the lunar dust of a lunar crater and affected by albedo and emissivity in a lesser degree. Based on the explanation with simplified models, the TB variation over a crater is proved to be significantly affected, through physical temperature, by the crater shape described by DEMs. With the simplified crater model, the amplitude of the TB oscillatory curves is proved to depend on the crater shape.