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Chandrayaan-3 APXS elemental abundance measurements at lunar high latitude

Nature volume 633, pages 327–331 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The elemental composition of the lunar surface provides insights into mechanisms of the formation and evolution of the Moon1,2. The chemical composition of lunar regolith have so far been precisely measured using the samples collected by the Apollo, Luna and Chang’e 5 missions, which are from equatorial to mid-latitude regions3,4; lunar meteorites, whose location of origin on the Moon is unknown5,6; and the in situ measurement from the Chang’e 3 and Chang’e 4 missions7,8,9, which are from the mid-latitude regions of the Moon. Here we report the first in situ measurements of the elemental abundances in the lunar southern high-latitude regions by the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) experiment10 aboard the Pragyan rover of India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission. The 23 measurements in the vicinity of the Chandrayaan-3 landing site show that the local lunar terrain in this region is fairly uniform and primarily composed of ferroan anorthosite (FAN), a product of the lunar magma ocean (LMO) crystallization. However, observation of relatively higher magnesium abundance with respect to calcium in APXS measurements suggests the mixing of further mafic material. The compositional uniformity over a few tens of metres around the Chandrayaan-3 landing site provides an excellent ground truth for remote-sensing observations.

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Fig. 1: Chandrayaan-3 landing site and APXS observation locations.
Fig. 2: APXS spectra and measured lunar elemental abundances.
Fig. 3: Compositional classification from APXS measurements.

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Data availability

APXS raw data and calibrated spectral files, along with the necessary calibration data for abundance estimation, will be available publicly at the Chandrayaan-3 portal of the ISRO Science Data Archive at https://pradan.issdc.gov.in/ch3/ from 23 August 2024. Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) data are available at https://pradan.issdc.gov.in/ch2/ (file id ch2_ohr_ncp_20211023T002746282). Data from the LRO WAC, Chandrayaan-1 M3, Kaguya TC and Clementine UVVIS instruments used in this publication are publicly available in the Planetary Data System (PDS) archives. Source data for Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 are provided with this paper.

Code availability

Spectral analysis carried out in this work uses the Xspec spectral fitting package (https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/xanadu/xspec/). Further analysis and plotting made use of the open-source Python packages numpy, scipy, matplotlib and pyrolite.

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Acknowledgements

The APXS experiment is designed and developed by the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad, supported by the Department of Space, Government of India. The Space Applications Centre (SAC), Ahmedabad, supported the fabrication and space qualification of the APXS flight model. We acknowledge the extensive support from the entire Chandrayaan-3 team, consisting of large groups from U R Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), Bangalore; Vikram Sarabhai Space Center (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram; ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC), Bangalore; Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), Sriharikota, as well as other ISRO centres. We specifically acknowledge the efforts of various teams involved in the operations of the Chandrayaan-3 Pragyan rover. We acknowledge the use of images from Chandrayaan-3 rover NavCam developed by the Laboratory for Electro-Optics Systems (LEOS) and processed by the SAC and the use of the image from the Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) aboard the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter provided by the SAC data processing team and archived at the Indian Space Science Data Center (ISSDC). We also acknowledge the use of data from the Chandrayaan-1 M3, LRO WAC, Kaguya TC and Clementine UVVIS instruments. A.B. was J.C. Bose Fellow during this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad, India

    Santosh V. Vadawale, N. P. S. Mithun, M. Shanmugam, Amit Basu Sarbadhikari, Rishitosh K. Sinha, Megha Bhatt, S. Vijayan, Neeraj Srivastava, Anil D. Shukla, S. V. S. Murty, Anil Bhardwaj, Y. B. Acharya, Arpit R. Patel, Hiteshkumar L. Adalaja, C. S. Vaishnava, B. S. Bharath Saiguhan, Nishant Singh, Sushil Kumar, Deepak Kumar Painkra, Yash Srivastava, Varsha M. Nair, Tinkal Ladiya, Shiv Kumar Goyal & Neeraj K. Tiwari

  2. Department of Geology, Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna University, Srinagar Garhwal, India

    Anil D. Shukla

  3. U R Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), ISRO, Bangalore, India

    Shyama Narendranath, Netra S. Pillai, Abhishek Kumar, Neeraj Satya, Vivek R. Subramanian, Sonal G. Navle, R. G. Venkatesh & Lalitha Abraham

  4. Space Applications Centre (SAC), ISRO, Ahmedabad, India

    Arup Kumar Hait, Aaditya Patinge, K. Suresh &  Amitabh

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  1. Santosh V. Vadawale
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  2. N. P. S. Mithun
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  3. M. Shanmugam
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Contributions

S.V.V., M.S., Y.B.A. and S.V.S.M. designed the experiment. M.S., A.R.P., H.L.A., T.L., S.K.G. and N.K.T. developed the APXS instrument. N.P.S.M., N.Si., S.K. and D.K.P. conducted the calibration experiments. A.K.H., A.P., A.K., N.Sa., V.R.S., S.G.N., R.G.V. and L.A. contributed to the mechanical, thermal and mechanism design and integration with the rover. K.S. and Am. provided the rover NavCam and Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) images. N.P.S.M., C.S.V. and B.S.B.S. carried out data processing. S.V.V. and N.P.S.M. performed the APXS data analysis. A.B.S. and Y.S. carried out the lithological and geochemical analysis. R.K.S., M.B., S.V. and N.Sr. carried out the remote-sensing analysis. A.D.S., A.B.S., Y.S. and V.M.N. carried out laboratory XRF measurements. S.N. and N.S.P. provided remote-sensing XRF data. S.V.V., N.P.S.M., A.B.S., R.K.S., M.B., S.V., N.Sr. and A.B. contributed to the interpretation and preparation of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Santosh V. Vadawale.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Maps of elemental abundances derived from M3.

Elemental abundance maps derived from M3 observations around the landing site (1° × 1°) are shown for Mg (a), Fe (b) and Ca (c). The blue square represents the landing site. Typical uncertainties in abundances are 1 wt% and the colour scale spans about 2σ around the value at the landing site. This shows that there is no variation in abundance over this spatial scale.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Reflectance spectrum of the landing site region.

a, M3 albedo map at 1,578 nm around the Chandrayaan-3 landing site. This 1° × 1° subset was extracted from M3 product ID M3G20090606T010302. The spatial resolution of the M3 strip used here is 280 m pixel−1. The blue dot in the centre shows the landing site. b, Extracted M3 spectrum from the pixel containing the Chandrayaan-3 landing site (marked by the blue dot in panel a). This reflectance spectrum represents a highland-type soil spectrum with no notable absorption feature at 1 and 2 μm.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Source of the material at the landing site.

a, Kaguya TC orthoimage showing the region around the landing site (marked by the solid yellow circle). The chains and clusters of secondaries (classes 1 and 2) are marked in the figure. Solid white lines represent the boundary of the ‘Ntp’ geological unit (intercrater plains region). b, False-colour composite image of band ratios from Clementine UVVIS134. The colours correspond to band ratios of 750 nm/415 nm (red), 750 nm/950 nm (green) and 415 nm/750 nm (blue). In the figure, mature lunar highlands appear in shades of red and the bright blue shades represent rays of a young crater135,136. Arrows mark the ejecta rays from the Schomberger crater extending towards the landing site.

Extended Data Fig. 4 APXS spectrum fitted with the model showing different components.

APXS spectrum (blue data points) from observation ID 18 fitted with the model consisting of continuum component (dashed black line) and lines of different elements. Dashed lines of different colours denote the line components corresponding to the elements marked with the same colour.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Distance dependence of line intensity and distance estimation from continuum rate.

a, Slope of the line intensity–abundance correlation, which is wt% per unit photons per second, of different elements as a function of the sample distance. Data points are the slope values; the solid lines show the power laws that fit them. b, Continuum rates (sum of count rates in 22.4–24.2-keV energy range) obtained for different geochemical reference materials are shown as a function of distance with the red data points and the black line shows the best-fit model. The continuum rate from lunar observation for observation ID 18, along with its error, is plotted on the curve to estimate the respective distance. The blue-shaded regions show uncertainties in the continuum rate and corresponding uncertainty in distance estimates. Uncertainties in the estimated distance are then propagated to abundance measurements through correlation parameters.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Abundance measurement from correlations.

An example of abundance measurement of the lunar sample (observation ID 15) from correlations obtained from ground calibration is shown. Dashed lines and faint points are correlations from USGS samples shown in Supplementary Figs. 2 and 3. Vertical grey shades show the measured line intensity with error from the lunar observation. Three solid lines show the correlation for the measured distance (orange) and at one standard deviation of the distance (blue and green). Matrix-corrected flux values are plotted on these correlations to obtain the abundances (error bars with respective colours). Measured abundance is shown with the red star symbols and associated uncertainties, including the distance uncertainties, are also shown.

Extended Data Fig. 7 Coadded spectrum from all observations.

APXS spectrum obtained by adding data from all 23 scientific observations amounting to a total exposure of 31.34 h. An extra line of zinc (Kα) is detected in the coadded spectrum.

Extended Data Table 1 Elemental abundances from individual APXS observations
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Comparison of APXS abundances with other measurements
Full size table
Extended Data Table 3 Normative mineralogy based on APXS-measured abundances for each observation
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information (download PDF )

The Supplementary Information file includes a supplementary section on calibration, Supplementary Figs. 1–4 and Supplementary Tables 1–5.

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Vadawale, S.V., Mithun, N.P.S., Shanmugam, M. et al. Chandrayaan-3 APXS elemental abundance measurements at lunar high latitude. Nature 633, 327–331 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07870-7

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