Mapping Mineral Abundances on the Moon Surface using Chang'E-1 IIM Data

The data acquired by the Inference Imaging Spectrometer (IIM) sensor on board of the Chinese Chang'E-1 mission can be used to infer important information on the Moon surface composition. In this work, the multi-path and multi-reflection phenomena occurring on its rugged surface recorded at the IIM rather coarse resolution (200m) are described by means of nonlinear spectral analysis based on the p-linear mixture model (pLMM) and the p-harmonic mixture model (pHMM). The analysis by pLMM and pHMM provides details on the materials and elements on the Moon surface, and their abundance distribution and fractional cover can be properly estimated without any a priori information on its chemical composition. Mineral map extractions using pLMM and pHMM have been considered and compared with those obtained by means of the modified partial least squares regression (PLSR) methodology, assessing the reliability and accuracy of the pLMM- and pHMM-based approach.