Crater Populations on the Walls of Complex Craters found near the Lunar Southern Pole

Date: June 23, 2022
Authors: C. L. Talkington and P. E. Montalvo
Notes: Data sets contain crater counts on floors of 16 lunar south polar complex craters and surface slopes at all counted craters. 

Data sets in crater_data.xlsx are updated from the previous version to improve the model age calculation. The current version uses an approach using Poisson’s statistics (Michael and Neukum, 2010; Michael et al., 2016).

ArcMap 10.7.1 was used in addition to the CraterTools Add in toolset (Kniessl et al., 2011) and DEM data from the PDS Geosciences Node (https://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/lro/lro-l-lola-3-rdr-v1/lrolol_1xxx/data/lola_gdr/polar/jp2/) to visualize the craters.Complex craters were selected from previous studies (Cannon et al., 2020; Deutsch et al., 2020; Tye et al., 2015) as regions of interest. The counts from this work span the walls of 16 complex craters found near the lunar southern pole, while those cited refer to the floor regions (Cannon et al., 2020; Deutsch et al., 2020), or the entire crater (Tye et al., 2015). Craters were included within the analysis from definitions described by Deutsch et al., (2020) as circular features with central depressions. We considered primary craters only, and those with morphologies reflecting secondary crater populations (crater chains or clusters) were omitted. Crater sizes range from sub km range to 35 km in diameter. Their slope conditions range from very shallow to very steep. 

PDS Geoscience Node DEM used ldem_80s_20m. This DEM has a resolution of 20 m/pixel and was updated 6/2/2017.
Data format, .csv files:
-    Column A: Diameter. Crater diameter [km]
-    Column B: Slope angle of crater [deg] determined by the 500 m buffer size from the determined crater radius.