2026-10-14T17:52:45Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33924433 2026-09-25T11:36:54Z category_25822 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

Automated Stratigraphy and Chronology Map of Lunar Mare Basalts Han Zhang (110653) Jian Chen (6669323) Planetary geology Lunar basalt <p dir="ltr">The ages and spatial characteristics of mare basalts are crucial for understanding lunar thermal evolution and volcanic activity. Currently, the spatiotemporal characteristics of mare basalts are commonly obtained through manual delineation of basalt units combined with the crater size-frequency distribution (CSFD) method. However, manual geological mapping is subjective and inefficient, and contamination by secondary craters can bias CSFD dating results. To address these issues, this study proposes an automated framework for mare basalt unit delineation and primary/secondary crater classification. Based on topographic and spectral data as well as derived products, a total of 1,545 basalt units were identified in the mare region through the combined application of simple linear iterative clustering and mean shift clustering methods. The internal compositional homogeneity of the automatically delineated units is generally superior to that of preciously and manually mapped units. For crater classification, five features were selected from both spatial clustering and morphological aspects, including eccentricity, depth-to-diameter ratio, Voronoi area, chain coefficient, and cluster coefficient, to construct a Random Forest classification model. This enabled automated classification of primary and secondary craters with diameters larger than 600 m in the mare region, attaining an overall accuracy of 92.81%. CSFD dating of lunar mare basalts was performed using the basalt units derived from automatic delineation and the filtered primary craters. The ages obtained in this study yield a mean absolute difference of 0.25 Ga compared with existing researches, and are generally consistent with the radioisotopic ages of samples returned by the Apollo, Luna, and Chang’e missions.</p><p dir="ltr">Citation:</p><p dir="ltr">Zhang, H., Zhang, J., Zhang, X., Jin, L., Zhou, Z., Wang, S., Wang, Y., Chen, J., Qiao, L., Ling, Z., Yue, Z., (2026), Automated Stratigraphic Mapping and Chronology of Lunar Mare Basalts. IEEE journal, submitted.</p> 2026-09-25T11:36:54Z Dataset Dataset 10.6084/m9.figshare.33924433.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Automated_Stratigraphy_and_Chronology_Map_of_Lunar_Mare_Basalts/33924433 CC BY 4.0