Surface erosion and sedimentation caused by ejecta from the lunar crater Tycho Y. Shkuratov a, * , A. Basilevsky b , V. Kaydash a , B. Ivanov c , V. Korokhin a , G. Videen d a Institute of Astronomy, V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, 35 Sumska St, Kharkiv, 61022, Ukraine b V. I. Vernadsky Institute, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, 117975, Russia c Institute for Dynamics of Geospheres, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 117939, Russia d Space Science Institute, 4750 Walnut St., Suite 205, Boulder, CO 80301, USA ABSTRACT We use Kaguya MI images acquired at wavelengths 415, 750, and 950 nm to map TiO 2 and FeO content and the parameter of optical maturity OMAT in lunar regions Lubiniezky E and Taurus-Littrow with a spatial resolution of 20 m using the Lucey method [Lucey et al., JGR 2000, 105. 20,297]. We show that some ejecta from large craters, such as Tycho and Copernicus may cause lunar surface erosion, transportation of the eroded material and its sedimentation. The traces of the erosion resemble wind tails observed on Earth, Mars, and Venus, although the Moon has no atmosphere. The highland material of the local topographic prominences could be mobilized by Tycho's granolometrically fine ejecta and caused by its transportation along the ejecta way to adjacent mare areas and subsequent deposition. The tails of mobilized material reveal lower abundances of Ti and Fe than the surrounding mare surface. We have concluded that high-Ti streaks also seen in the Lubiniezky E site, which show unusual combinations of the TiO 2 and FeO content on the correlation diagram, could be the result of erosion by Tycho's ejecta too. In these locations, Tycho's material did not form a consolidated deposit, but resulted in erosion of the mare surface material that became intermixed, consequently, diluting the ejecta. The Taurus-Littrow did provide evidence of the mechanical effect of Tycho's ejecta on the local landforms (landslide, secondary craters) and do not show the compositional signature of Tycho's ejecta probably due to intermixing with local materials and dilution. 1. Introduction For the last decade a number of space missions have acquired high- resolution images of the lunar surface in different spectral ranges. This includes, first of all, data from JAXA Kaguya and NASA LRO missions (e.g., Ohtake et al., 2008; Robinson et al., 2010). These missions provided new opportunities to analyze jointly the morphological and compositional characteristics of surface features as well as the processes that formed them. This paper considers the phenomena of surface erosion and comple- mentary sedimentation caused by ejecta from rather large lunar impacts. This process was studied many decades ago (Oberbeck, 1975). We notice potential evidence of this phenomenon caused by ejecta of the 86-km crater Tycho. This crater is only ~100 Ma old (e.g., Lucchitta, 1977; Hiesinger et al., 2012), so the considered phenomena are geologically young. As can be seen in Fig. 1, the rays of Tycho cover the lunar nearside and, perhaps, their traces can be found even on the farside. The ejecta material consists of rocks and debris of different sizes, including some amount of fine particles. These can be locally deposited on the surface in rather large region surrounding of the crater. The ejecta also may produce secondary craters that in turn excavate subsurface material that is brighter than that in the undisturbed vicinity (e.g., Hawke et al., 2004). The ejecta impacts can also provoke landslides. We suggest that some oblique impact jets, which contain large amounts of relatively fine fragments, affect the lunar surface as an abrasive hail that may provide horizontal trans- portation of the local regolith from mounts and other elevated topography units. This can form tails resembling streaks of aeolian transportation and deposition, which are characteristic of Earth, Mars and Venus, although the Moon has no atmosphere (Schultz, 1992; Tornabene et al., 2006; Schultz and Quintana, 2017). In our analysis of optical remote-sensing data for the south-eastern part of Oceanus Procellarum (Lubiniezky E site) we have found such traces (Korokhin et al., 2017). We here study the traces in more detail using Japanese Kaguya multispectral data for mapping chemical composition with the Lucey et al. (1995, 2000) technique. Using this approach we here study the Lubiniezky E and Taurus Littrow regions, the shaded images of which are displayed in the insets of Fig. 1. The insets were calculated using LROC WAC data with the technique described by Korokhin et al. (2014, 2016). This technique provides noticeably better resolution than it was suggested with the elevation data set GLD100 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: yuriy.shkuratov@gmail.com (Y. Shkuratov). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Planetary and Space Science journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pss https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2017.12.002 Received 11 March 2017; Received in revised form 28 November 2017; Accepted 1 December 2017 Available online xxxx 0032-0633/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Planetary and Space Science xxx (2017) 1–11 Please cite this article in press as: Shkuratov, Y., et al., Surface erosion and sedimentation caused by ejecta from the lunar crater Tycho, Planetary and Space Science (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2017.12.002