Lunar photometric properties at wavelengths 0.5–1.6 μm acquired by SELENE Spectral Profiler and their dependency on local albedo and latitudinal zones

Abstract The lunar photometric function, which describes the dependency of the observed radiance on the observation geometry, is used for photometric correction of lunar visible/near-infrared data. A precise photometric correction parameter set is crucial for many applications including mineral identification and reflectance map mosaics. We present, for the first time, spectrally continuous photometric correction parameters for both sides of the Moon for wavelengths in the range 0.5–1.6 μm and solar phase angles between 5° and 85°, derived from Kaguya (SELENE) Spectral Profiler (SP) data. Since the measured radiance also depends on the surface albedo, we developed a statistical method for selecting areas with relatively uniform albedos from a nearly 7000-orbit SP data set. Using the selected data set, we obtained empirical photometric correction parameter sets for three albedo groups (high, medium, and low). We did this because the photometric function depends on the albedo, especially at phase angles below about 20° for which the shadow hiding opposition effect is appreciable. We determined the parameters in 160 bands and discovered a small variation in the opposition effect due to the albedo variation of mafic mineral absorption. The consistency of the photometric correction was checked by comparing observations made at different times of the same area on the lunar surface. Variations in the spectra obtained were lower than 2%, except for the large phase angle data in mare. Lastly, we developed a correction method for low solar elevation data, which is required for high latitude regions. By investigating low solar elevation data, we introduced an additional correction method. We used the new photometric correction to generate a 1° mesh global lunar reflectance map cube in a wavelength range of 0.5–1.6 μm. Surprisingly, these maps reveal that high latitude (≳75°) regions in both the north and south have much lower spectral continuum slopes (color ratio r 1547.7nm / r 752.8nm  ≲ 1.8) than the low and medium latitude regions, which implies lower degrees of space weathering.