PyNAPLE: Lunar Surface Impact Crater Detection by Daniel Sheward et al. on Wednesday 23 November

In the last 20 years, over 600 impact flashes have been documented on the

lunar surface. This wealth of data presents a unique opportunity to study the

meteoroid flux of the Earth-Moon environment, and in recent years the physical

properties of the impactors. However, other than through serendipitous events,

there has not been yet a systematic search and discovery of the craters

associated to these events. Such a meteoroid-crater link would allow us to get

insight into the crater formation via these live observations of collisions.

Here we present the PyNAPLE (Python NAC Automated Pair Lunar Evaluator)

software pipeline for locating newly formed craters using the location and

epoch of an observed impact flash. We present the first results from PyNAPLE,

having been implemented on the 2017-09-27 impact flash.

A rudimentary analysis on the impact flash and linked impact crater is also

performed, finding that the crater's ejecta pattern indicates an impact angle

between 10-30 degree, and although the rim-to-rim diameter of the crater is not

resolvable in current LRO NAC images, using crater scaling laws we predict this

diameter to be 24.1-55.3 m, and using ejecta scaling predict a diameter of

27.3-37.7 m. We discuss how PyNAPLE will enable large scale analyses of

sub-kilometer scale cratering rates and refinement of both scaling laws, and

the luminous efficiency.

arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2204.12265v2