Abstract The goal of this study is to determine the typical lifetime of permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) hosted inside craters near the lunar south pole at scales from tens of meters to kilometers. We evaluated the population of craters that host PSRs south of 84°S by generating a crater catalog using automatic recognition with machine learning, training YOLOv8 on a controlled polar LROC mosaic. To avoid missing craters in areas of high overlap, this catalog was augmented with heuristic-derived detections on a LOLA DEM at diameters D ≥ 100 m and by a manual catalog at D ≥ 1 km. The catalog has 2.1 × 10 7 craters with a diameter D ≥ 10 m and constitutes a statistically useful set of detections down to D ∼ 10 m, covering all areas illuminated in the LROC mosaic. This crater catalog was compared with a LOLA-derived catalog of PSRs, and ∼80% of the PSRs were matched with a discrete host crater. Analysis of the matched population shows that large craters ( D > 3–4 km) can host PSRs indefinitely, but craters of D ∼ 100 m remain permanently shadowed cold traps for only ∼100 Myr. At sizes D < 100 m, high-resolution topography is needed to assess PSR lifetime. Using the VIPER extended mission area as an example, D ∼ 25 m crater-hosted PSRs have a lifetime of ∼10 Myr. These results reinforce the idea that decameter-scale PSRs are geologically short-lived, so if volatiles are found within them, it requires recent volatile delivery and/or migration. In contrast, kilometer-scale cold traps can persist for most of lunar history, assuming stability of the Moon’s obliquity.
Fassett et al. (Wed,) studied this question.