The Wide-Angle Polarimetric Camera (PolCam) is installed on the Korea’s lunar orbiter, Danuri, which launched on August 5, 2022. The mission objectives of PolCam are to construct photometric maps at a wavelength of 336 nm and polarization maps at 461 and 748 nm, with a phase angle range of 0◦–135◦ and a spatial resolution of less than 100 m. PolCam is an imager using the push-broom method and has two cameras, Cam 1 and Cam 2, with a viewing angle of 45◦ to the right and left of the spacecraft’s direction of orbit. We conducted performance tests in a laboratory setting before installing PolCam’s flight model on the spacecraft. We analyzed the CCD’s dark current, flat-field frame, spot size, and light flux. The dark current was obtained during thermal / vacuum test with various temperatures and the flat-field frame data was also obtained with an integrating sphere and tungsten light bulb. We describe the calibration method and results in this study.

Polarimetric measurements of the lunar surface from lunar orbit soon will be available via Wide-Field Polarimetric Camera (PolCam) onboard the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), which is planned to be launched in mid 2022. To provide calibration data for the PolCam, we are conducting speckle polarimetric measurements of the nearside of the Moon from the Earth’s ground. It appears that speckle imaging of the Moon for scientific purposes has not been attempted before, and there is need for a procedure to create a “lucky image” from a number of observed speckle images. As a first step of obtaining calibration data for the PolCam from the ground, we search for the best sharpness measure for lunar surfaces. We then calculate the minimum number of speckle images and the number of images to be shift-and-added for higher resolution (sharpness) and signal-to-noise ratio.

The lunar surface progressively darkens and reddens as a result of sputtering from solar wind particles and bombardment of micrometeoroids. The extent of exposure to these space weathering agents is frequently calculated as the location in a diagram of reflectance at 750 nm vs. 950 nm/750 nm color (R-C). Sim & Kim (2018) examined the R-C trends of pixels within ∼3,500 craters, and revealed that the length (L) and skewness (s) of R-C trends can be employed as a secondary age or maturity indicator. We broaden this research to general lunar surface areas (3,400 tiles of 0.25◦ × 0.25◦ size) in 218 mare basalt units, whose ages have been derived from the size-frequency distribution analysis by Hiesinger et al. (2011). We discover that L and s rise with age until ∼3.2 Gyr and reduce rather rapidly afterward, while the optical maturity, OMAT, reduces monotonically with time. We show that in some situations, when not only OMAT but also L and s are incorporated in the estimation utilizing 750 & 950 nm photometry, the age estimation becomes considerably more reliable. We also observed that OMAT and the lunar cratering chronology function (cumulative number of craters larger than a certain diameter as a function of time) have a relatively linear relationship.