The Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been mapping the surface temperatures of the Moon since 5 July 2009. Diviner has since collected over 500 billion radiometric measurements with excellent spatial and local time coverage. However, the most recently published high-resolution Diviner global maps only use data collected from 2009 to 2016. In this work, we compile ∼13 years of Diviner data to produce improved global maps of nighttime brightness temperature, bolometric temperature, regolith temperature, and rock abundance (RA). Errors in Diviner's pointing have been corrected and past effective field of view modeling has been optimized to improve data georeferencing without spatial interpolation. We estimate an effective resolution of ∼330 m longitudinally and ∼700 m latitudinally at the equator, which corresponds to an improvement of ∼3.5× longitudinally and ∼1.3× latitudinally. In addition, we develop a thermal model that accounts for indirect scattering and emission from surrounding topography. The resulting temperature anomaly maps better highlight variations in temperature caused by thermophysical properties by removing most topographic effects. These improvements allow for the identification of smaller and fainter thermal features than was previously possible. The improved effective resolution of Diviner maps allows for excellent spatial correlation with other high-resolution data sets. To demonstrate this, we compare Diviner RA to a manual survey of boulders in the Apollo 17 landing site region. We show that Diviner RA correlates well with the areal fraction of rocks larger than ∼1–2 m in diameter visible in LRO Camera imagery.

The distribution of impact craters on the ejecta of Giordano Bruno, a recent (<10 Ma) 22-km diameter crater within the lunar highlands, exhibits substantial variations. We surveyed craters D ≥ 10 m across a 1,323 km² area of Giordano Bruno's ejecta and compared the distribution of craters with variations in thermophysical properties derived from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Diviner instrument. We used Diviner-derived rock abundance and nighttime regolith temperatures along with thermal model-predicted surface temperatures for a diversity of terrains to identify and isolate areas of the ejecta based on thermophysical properties such as bulk density and thermal conductivity. We found that thermophysical properties of the ejecta vary considerably both laterally and vertically, and consistently differ from typical regolith, indicating the presence of higher thermal inertia materials. Crater-size frequencies are significantly lower in areas with terrain properties exhibiting higher: rock abundance, nighttime temperatures, and/or modeled thermal inertia. This discrepancy in crater distribution increases for craters smaller than ∼25 m. These thermophysical variations indicate changes in the mechanical properties of the target materials. We suggest that these variations-specifically, terrain-dependent crater scaling variations and impactor-scale heterogeneities in material properties such as the presence or absence of large boulders-may influence crater diameters or inhibit crater production altogether in Giordano Bruno's ejecta; furthermore, these factors are size-dependent.