Browsing by Subject "Regolith inclusions"
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Item Sublimation and photodissociation in the LCROSS ejecta plume : effects of lunar material(2019-04-08) Agrawal, Aayush; Hall, M. J. (Matthew John); Goldstein, David Benjamin, doctor of aeronauticsThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched the Lunar Crater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission to confirm the presence/absence of water ice and the nature of the regolith on the surface of the Moon. Previous workers [1, 2, 3] developed a numerical model to simulate the LCROSS impact and characterize the lunar regolith by comparing numerical results with the actual observations. In this study, we present an improved grain heating and sublimation model, and explore photodissociation of water ice as a potential source of observed hydroxyl in the impact plume. We consider icy grains with lunar regolith inclusions and calculate the absorption and emission efficiencies of the grains using Mie theory. The grains with regolith inclusions create a denser vapor cloud in the plume and thus a greater amount of hydroxyl. The hydroxyl obtained from direct photodissociation of ice in the grains is also an important component of hydroxyl observations made by LCROSS