Influence of lunar topography on simulated surface temperature

The surface temperature of the Moon is one of the essential parameters for the lunar exploration, especially to evaluate the Moon thermophysical features. The distribution of the temperature is heavily influenced by the Moon topography, which, however, is rarely studied in the state-of-art surface temperature models. Therefore, this paper takes the Moon topography into account to improve the surface temperature model, Racca model. The main parameters, such as slopes along the longitude and latitude directions, are estimated with the topography data from Chang’E-1 satellite and the Horn algorithm. Then the effective solar illumination model is then constructed with the slopes and the relative position to the subsolar point. Finally, the temperature distribution over the Moon surface is obtained with the effective illumination model and the improved Racca model. The results indicate that the distribution of the temperature is very sensitive to the fluctuation of the Moon surface. The change of the surface temperature is up to 150 K in some places compared to the result without considering the topography. In addition, the variation of the surface temperature increases with the distance from the subsolar point and the elevation, along both latitude and longitude directions. Furthermore, the simulated surface temperature coincides well with the brightness temperature in 37 GHz observed by the microwave sounder onboard Chang’E-2 satellite. The corresponded emissivity map not only eliminates the influence of the topography, but also hints the inherent properties of the lunar regolith just below the surface. Last but not the least, the distribution of the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) in the lunar pole area is also evaluated with the simulated surface temperature result.