Dear CRaTER team,

As you saw from Noah’s email earlier, he and Maria are currently compiling the ESM6 proposal with the help of the theme leads. A working google docs draft will be circulated to the full LRO science team sometime next week for broader feedback. However, it’ll likely be easier if I can integrate your input before then (lots of separate feedback to a very large document could get a little chaotic).

So far, I’ve had some very helpful feedback from Jody, Fatemeh and Andrew – much appreciated!

I tried to draw input from the quad charts some of you provided, so am keen to make sure that nothing important got lost or mis-represented.

So, I have some follow-up questions for the CRaTER section:

• I’d like to comment on how SEPs are affected by the varying solar cycle. I originally had that mixed in with the Sun’s magnetic field flipping polarity, but it seems that might be misleading. Observing SEPs in ESM6 will be important and it would be neat to tie that in the bigger solar cycle story.

• There was a comment in the feedback draft about extreme and dangerous activity anticipated during the declining phase of Solar Cycle 25. My understanding is there are typically more SEPs during this phase, so I want to capture that appropriately (this is what I was perhaps struggling to do with the original text – see above).

• In the Methodology section I mentioned looking for hydrogen in the top ~10 cm – this got flagged. I think I based this on Mark’s quad chart, and this was tied in with better modeling of the albedo radiation, sensor response, etc.

• Andrew had some suggestions about also looking for changes in gammas with Hale Cycle, and about how albedo radiation changes with a hardening GCR spectrum at solar max. This could be used to predict the local (albedo) radiation environment on the Moon with solar activity.
• If there’s consensus on this change then the text for this will need to be reworked.

• Please also check the discussion of CRaTER in the Introductory paragraph.

• In the full ESM6 draft, for some reason the section title got changed to: “Characterizing Lunar Albedo Radiation: The Moon’s Spatially and Temporally Variable Radiation Environment”. I’m not sure this captures the breadth of what we want to do – let me know what you think?

• Other title suggestions are welcomed!

• As a reminder, for edits to the draft text – use this link

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nxdb9uvcAPYSH5IZrVjFkmBCqxc2AJXl/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=109244931172146409872&rtpof=true&sd=true

• Here are the very rough versions of the figures for reference

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LReg-PcOGU59fq86H4f5gWVbpHiKN9Fh/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=109244931172146409872&rtpof=true&sd=true
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FSf-sYO4kZVpdGM6IXIeLNwcN8TJtGqV/view?usp=drive_link
• For figure LE1, Fatemeh and Jody are re-working the top panel and Phillip has sent me some input for the bottom panel.

Thanks for your help,

Tim