LRO Lyman Alpha Mapping Project Far-Ultraviolet Reflectance, Volatile, and Exosphere Investigations: Latest Results, Despite the Pandemic

In spite of the difficulties we’ve all faced during the global pandemic, the LRO LAMP team has published several papers with important results that we summarize in this presentation. LAMP investigations into the lunar permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) proceeded with Magaña, PhD, 2021 and Magaña et al. “LRO-LAMP Survey of Lunar South Pole Cold Traps: Implication for the Presence of Condensed H₂O,” in review in JGR Planets, where LAMP’s spectral survey of PSR far-UV reflectance is compared with Diviner temperature distributions. Mandt et al., Nature Comm., 2022 report an analysis of relative abundances in the LCROSS impact plume pointing to a primarily exogenic origin of volatiles (most likely comets), and firmly excluding volcanic outgassing as a primary source. Byron et al., PSJ, 2021 report a far-UV calibrated optical maturity correction method, which opens a new pathway for focusing on compositional elements in far-UV spectral analyses. A publication in preparation by Czajka et al. highlights LAMP’s constraints to the compositional units at Aristarchus crater and plateau. Waller et al., Front. Astron. Space Sci., 2022 report LAMP Lyman-alpha space weathering features compared with radial B-field structure at the Reiner Gamma lunar swirl, characterizing solar wind interaction effects. Upcoming publications by Gimar et al. and Mamo et al. highlight the LAMP team’s laboratory far-UV reflectance measurements of lunar simulant and water ice, respectively. Ongoing improvements to LAMP’s mapping pipelines incorporate photometric parameters, being revised. Of importance to LAMP’s nightside-PSR hemispheric-illumination mapping approach, Pryor et al., AJ, 2022 report supporting evidence for a galactic Lyman-alpha sky-background signal using Cassini UVIS data. Magaña et al. PSJ, 2022 report LAMP observations of Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) showing good agreement with water outgassing rate trends during that epoch. Wedemeyer, Teolis, and Grava are preparing models of lunar argon and neon for comparison with LAMP exosphere measurements, while Grava et al., MNRAS, 2021 continued LAMP’s in-depth investigations into the exospheric helium constituent variability as related to its surface accommodation.