Detection and Modeling of Visible Albedo Due to Surficial Ice at the Lunar South Pole (*)
Date:
Authors: Jordan Ando, Shuai Li
Ando J. K., Li S., Detection and Modeling of Visible Albedo Due to Surficial Ice at the Lunar South Pole (2023), Lunar Planet. Sci. LIIV, Abstract #1295
This project is the result of my first semester at UH. Ahead of Shadowcam’s data release, we re-examined long-exposure images taken by the Narrow Angle Camera for ice, specifically in locations where ice was previously detected by the $M^3$ spectrometer (Li et al. 2018). I also used Hapke’s radiative transfer model (Hapke 1981) to simulate ice exposures, and characterize how they would appear in visible band images if ice were present at various abundances.
This project, while ongoing, has served as an introduction to working with single-band image datasets, which will be helpful for future studies involving Shadowcam. It was also a welcome introduction to radiative transfer modeling–I began to learn why Hapke’s model is a common and powerful tool in planetary spectroscopy.
I completed most of the analysis in this project using Python. I learned geopandas, shapely, and rasterio, which were valuable tools for working with large geospatial datasets. I also implemented Hapke’s RTM as a Python package to make it easy to work with on future projects.