Research on water ice content in Cabeus crater using the data from the microwave radiometer onboard Chang'e-1 satellite

The existence, formation and content of water ice in the lunar permanently shaded region is one of the important questions for the current Moon study. On October 9, 2009, the LCROSS mission spacecraft impacted the Moon, and the initial result verified the existence of water on the Moon. But the study on formation and content of water ice is still under debate. The existence of water ice can change the dielectric constants of the lunar regolith, and a microwave radiometer is most sensitive to the dielectric parameters. Based on this, in this paper, the radiation transfer model is improved according to the simulation results in high frequency. Then the mixture dielectric constant models, including Odelevsky model, Wagner and landau-Lifshitz model, Clau-sius model, Gruggeman-Hanai model, etc., are analyzed and compared. The analyzing results indicate that the biggest difference occurs between Lichtenecker model and the improved Dobson model. The values estimated by refractive model are the second biggest in all the models. And the results from Odelevsky model, strong fluctuation model, Wagner and Landau -Lifshitz model, Clausius model and Bruggeman-Hanai model are very near to each other. Thereafter, the relation between volume water ice content and microwave brightness temperature is constructed with Odelevsky mixing dielectric model and the improved radiative transfer simulation, and the volume water ice content in Cabeus crater is retrieved with the data from microwave radiometer onboard Chang'e-1 satellite. The results present that the improved radiative transfer model is proper for the brightness temperature simulation of the one infinite regolith layer in high frequency. The brightness temperature in Cabeus crater is 69.93 K (37 GHz), and the corresponding volume water ice content is about 2.8%.