Ejecta Plume Detectability in the NMSU-NASA Marshall Space Flight Center LCROSS Observational Campaign using PCA Filtering
Abstract
On 9 October 2009, NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission produced the collision of a kinetic impactor with the permanently shadowed Cabeus crater [1, 2]. Following impact, a spatially resolved plume was not detected from multiple Earth-based imaging cameras [3]. After image filtering utilizing Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the data from four Earth-based cameras revealed three plume detections and one non-detection [4-6]. The purpose of this extension of the LCROSS analysis is to inspect R-band video from the New Mexico State University (NMSU) 1.0 meter telescope and near-IR video from the Tortugas Mountain Observatory (TMO) 0.6 meter telescope for the presence of a plume. We utilized the same data reduction methodology as the four prior cameras [5, 6]. PCA breaks the videos into statistically independent contributions, termed principal components (PCs), which reveals the different sources of the temporal changes to the scene. Filtering out select PCs from the videos allows us to remove atmospheric seeing effects to search for plume signal within Cabeus crater. Preliminary analysis of the NMSU and TMO videos revealed non-detections. Factors leading to plume non-detectability could include ambient light scattering [7], the large lunar landscape field of view, or the analog to digital conversion (ADC) of the data with the use of 8-bit resolution. We explore the effects of ADC with and without gamma correction as a possible cause of the NMSU and TMO non-detections. We also investigate the effect of field of view on our PCA filtering technique. This work was supported by grant number NNX15AP92G. [1] Colaprete, A. et al. (2010) Science, 330, 463-468. [2] Schultz, P. H. et al. (2010) Science, 330, 468-472. [3] Heldmann, J. L. et al. (2012) SSRv, 167, 93-140. [4] Strycker, P. D. et al. (2013) Nat. Commun., 4:2620, doi:10.1038/ncomms3620. [5] Temme, R. L. et al.(2016) LPS XLVII, Abstract #1166. [6] Schotte, J. M.et al. (2017) LPS XLVIII, Abstract #1503. [7] Strycker, P. D. et al. (2017) AAS DPS #49, 417.14.
- Publication:
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AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts #50
- Pub Date:
- October 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018DPS....5011601M