An overview and perspective of identifying lunar craters

Abstract

The spatiotemporal evolution of lunar impact craters is crucial for investigating lunar interior structure, internal and external dynamic processes, and interplanetary impact history. Advances in lunar crater identification are reviewed based on topography and gravity data, and the features and mechanisms of topographic or buried craters are analyzed regarding morphology, gravity anomalies, gravity gradients, and the underlying crust-mantle interface relief. Based on the compiled crater catalog, the early lunar impact flux and thermal evolution are further discussed according to the basin ages and their interior structures. For some ancient impact basins, the crater size-frequency distribution measurements revealed age discrepancies from previous studies, suggesting that the lunar late heavy bombardment event started at ∼3.95 Ga. The degraded bulge structures of the crust-mantle interface beneath mare basins reveal that these basins formed on the lunar crust surface under high-temperature conditions and underwent prolonged relaxation compared to highland basins. Finally, we reveal that the up-to-date identification of lunar buried craters remains inaccurate and incomplete, preventing us from accurately reconstructing lunar and interplanetary impact histories. Therefore, we propose that a gravity model constructed using localized orthogonal basis functions can be useful for identifying lunar craters.