A Remote Sensing Perspective on Mass Wasting in Contrasting Planetary Environments: Cases of the Moon and Ceres

Abstract

Mass wasting, as one of the most significant geomorphological processes, contributes immensely to planetary landscape evolution. The frequency and diversity of mass wasting features on any planetary body also put engineering constraints on its robotic exploration. Mass wasting on other Solar System bodies shares similar, although not identical, morphological characteristics with its terrestrial counterpart, indicating a possible common nature for their formation. Thus, planetary bodies with contrasting environmental conditions might help reveal the effects of the atmosphere, subsurface fluids, mass accumulation/precipitation, and seismicity on mass wasting, and vice versa. Their relative positions within our Solar System and the environmental and geophysical conditions on the Moon and the dwarf planet Ceres are not only extremely different from Earth’s but from each other too. Their smaller sizes coupled with the availability of global-scale remote sensing datasets make them ideal candidates to understand mass wasting processes in widely contrasting planetary environments. Through this concept article, we highlight several recent advances in and prospects of using remote sensing datasets to reveal unprecedented details on lunar and Cerean mass wasting processes. We start with briefly discussing several recent studies on mass wasting using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) data for the Moon and Dawn spacecraft data for Ceres. We further identify the prospects of available remote sensing data in advancing our understanding of mass wasting processes under reduced gravity and in a scant (or absent) atmosphere, and we conclude the article by suggesting future research directions.