Abstract
Constraining the volatile budget of the lunar interior has important
ramifications for models of Moon formation. While many early and
previous measurements of samples acquired from the Luna and Apollo
missions suggested the lunar interior is depleted in highly volatile
elements like H, a number of high-precision analytical studies over the
past decade have argued that it may be more enriched in water than
previously thought. Here, we integrate recent remotely sensed
near-infrared reflectance measurements of several Dark-Mantle-Deposits
(DMDs), interpreted to represent pyroclastic deposits, and physics-based
eruption models to better constrain the pre-eruptive water content of
lunar volcanic glasses. We model the trajectory and water loss of
pyroclasts from eruption to deposition, coupling eruption dynamics with
a volatile diffusion model for each pyroclast. Modeled pyroclast sizes
and final water contents are then used to predict spectral reflectance
properties for comparison with the observed orbital near-infrared data.
We develop an inversion scheme based on the Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo
(MCMC) method to retrieve constraints between governing parameters such
as the initial volatile content of the melt and the pyroclast size
distribution (which influences the remotely measured water absorption
strengths). The MCMC inversion allows us to estimate the primordial
(pre-eruption) water content for different DMDs and test whether their
source is volatile-rich. Our results suggest that the parts of the lunar
interior sampled by the source material of the DMDs investigated in this
study range in water content from 400 to 800 ppm.