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Mineral map of the Moon from M3

Mineral map of the Moon from M3
Mineral map of the Moon from M3 The Moon Mineralogy Mapper is a spectrometer, which returns hundreds of measurements of the brightness of the surface at each pixel in its images. The spectral data can be processed to yield maps of the abundance of minerals on the Moon. In this RGB image, the red channel is the brightness of the surface at a wavelength of 1580 nanometers; bright areas contain more plagioclase feldspar and less mafic minerals, indicating the lunar highlands material. The green channel represents the depth of an absorption feature at 1000 nanometers, while the blue channel represents the depth of an absorption feature at 2000 nanometers. These two channels map the presence of iron-bearing "mafic" minerals common in the maria basalts. Different-age lava flows contain different abundances of these mafic minerals, resulting in different colors in this map. ISRO / NASA / JPL-Caltech / Brown University