Recognition of landslides in lunar impact craters

Abstract

Landslides have been observed on several planets and minor bodies of the solar System, including the Moon. Notwithstanding different types of slope failures have been studied on the Moon, a detailed lunar landslide inventory is still pending. Undoubtedly, such will be in a benefit for future geological and morphological studies, as well in hazard, risk and susceptibility assessments. A preliminary survey of lunar landslides in impact craters has been done using visual inspection on images and digital elevation model (DEM) (Brunetti et al. 2015) but this method suffers from subjective interpretation. A new methodology based on polynomial interpolation of crater cross-sections extracted from global lunar DEMs is presented in this paper. Because of their properties, Chebyshev polynomials were already exploited for parametric classification of different crater morphologies (Mahanti et al., 2014). Here, their use has been extended to the discrimination of slumps in simple impact craters. Two criteria for recognition have provided the best results: one based on fixing an empirical absolute thresholding and a second based on statistical adaptive thresholding. The application of both criteria to a data set made up of 204 lunar craters’ cross-sections has demonstrated that the former criterion provides the best recognition.

Keywords

• Moon
• landslides
• craters
• Chebyshev polynomials
• digital elevation model (DEM)
• morphological analysis