The crater with gravity anomaly in the center may be the ancient volcanic crater and geothermal under it

Abstract

Lunar volcanism play an important role on studying the thermal and compositional evolution of the Moon. However, the studies on the relationships among composition, location and age of Lunar volcanos are still limit. The high-quality and multi-source remote sensing data offer the opportunity to obtain significant features of the Lunar volcanism and the evolution of the Moon. Specifically, the high-quality gravitational features of volcanic landforms of the Moon are observed by the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory. Besides, the lunar reconnaissance orbiter camera provides detail morphologic features of Lunar volcanos based on high-resolution optical images. This paper aims to find the characteristic of lunar volcanos by observing the gravitational and morphologic features in the center of craters. The final results show that most of the craters with central peaks have gravity anomalies except the Mendeleev crater (5.7 °N and 140.9 °E) whose central area contains significant gravity anomalies but no central peaks. The area of gravity anomaly may indicate heat source under the ground.