In-situ mapping of iron and titanium with the visible and near-infrared image spectrometer (VNIS) along the Yutu-2 rover traverse on the farside of the moon

In January 2019, China's Chang'E-4 probe successfully landed in the Von K & aacute;rm & aacute;n crater of the Moon's farside's South Pole-Aitken basin. Till August 2021, the Yutu-2 rover had worked for >32 lunar days. The Visible and Near-infrared Image Spectrometer (VNIS) is one of scientific payloads on board the rover that can collect in-situ spectral data. This provides a unique perspective for investigating the composition of the lunar surface materials. In this work, a local-scale FeO and TiO2 abundance mapping approach based on the in-situ VNIS data was proposed to utilize the fine spectral-spatial hyperspectral information. Improved FeO and TiO2 abundance inversion models were performed on each unshaded pixel to generate abundance maps. Experimental results obtained on 115 VNIS observation data along the Yutu-2's routing path confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach, especially in the complex observation scenarios. Comparing with the in-orbit data products and the in-situ abundance results obtained by the reference methods, the effectiveness of the proposed in-situ FeO and TiO2 abundance mapping approach is validated. Furthermore, the proposed approach allows a detailed analysis of chemical properties and spatial distribution of lunar surface materials, and helps to discover abnormal targets according to the serial spectral observations along the rover's routing path, which reveals the great potential in more precise lunar surface material identification and analysis applications.