Study of the Buried Basin C-H, Based on the Multi-Source Remote Sensing Data
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)
L 55-56:
This sentence is not clear. Consider rephrasing this sentence:
Few of them brought in remote sensing images to try to prove their inference.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)
The manuscript submitted by Xu et al. conducted a detailed study on the mascon in the southeast of the Copernicus crater using multi-source remote sensing data and proposed that it should be a buried peak-ring crater. The study could be helpful for the identification of lunar buried structures. However, major revisions are needed to clarify some points regarding the geological units and age of the region, and a careful check of the manuscript is necessary to correct grammatical and typographical errors.
1. Title: “buried basin C-H” is not an official crater name, which may confuse readers. I would suggest using “a buried basin in the southeast of Copernicus crater” instead.
2. Line 31: More references should be added to support this statement.
3. Line 38: “has” should be “have”.
4. Lines 79-80: This is not correct. Ejecta of Copernicus impact cannot mantle most of the lunar nearside. Please check this statement.
5. Figures 1c, 5, 13b & 17a: Legends in these figures are not clear. Please provide high-resolution versions. Besides, it is better to introduce all the geological units in your study area in the maintext.
6. Lines 97-98: Please define the abbreviations in this sentence before using them.
7. Line 99: “TCortho” should be “TC ortho”; “analysis” should be “analyze”
8. Line 141: How do the authors get the value “140 km”? Does it refer to the C-H basin or all the lunar craters?
9. Line 133: “Lunar ” should be “the Moon”
10. Section 2.4: The authors mentioned in lines 148-149 that resurfacing events may have occurred in the study area. Do they apply “resurfacing correction” mentioned in Michael and Neukum (2010)? If not, why? Besides, in lines 153-154, the authors mentioned that both the cumulative and differential fits are used, but in Figures 6 & 7, I didn’t find the cumulative plots. Please add the cumulative plots.
11. Section 2.5: The authors only introduced the method to obtain OMAT in this section. Please introduce more on how to acquire the olivine contents.
12. Lines 176-178: Please add references to this sentence. Besides, are there other cases that can lead to this pattern?
13. Figure 2: Please add a unit to the values.
14. Figure 4: It’s better to add high-resolution images of the two areas in the red boxes, which can help readers to confirm the origin of the elevated areas.
15. Line 223: “7nvestigated” should be “investigated”
16. Section 3.3: Before performing crater counting, identifying different geological units is necessary. Generally, crater counting should be conducted in homogeneous geological units, or else the ages acquired may not be reliable. Currently, based on the geological map (fig.5), the crater counting area involved multiple units.
17. Lines 246-247: Please add the reference to this sentence.
18. Lines 284-288: The authors have introduced these features in the method section. It’s not necessary to repeat them here.
19. Lines 338-340: Please add references to this sentence.
20. Lines 364-365: Considering the error range of the dating results, it may not be reliable to assign these ages to different basaltic events.
21. Lines 392-393: Please delete this sentence as it is part of the template file.
22. There are several grammatical and typographical errors in the manuscript, making some sentences hard to understand, e.g., Lines 189-194, Lines 294-296, Lines 339-341. A careful read of the final manuscript would be necessary.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)
Manuscript Title: “Study of buried basin C-H based on Multi Source Remote Sensing Data”
The manuscript describes the investigation of a lunar mascon by combining several data. The study is interesting and the approach used provides a detailed analysis of the area but most of the sentences are complicated and structurally wrong. Before the publication, the manuscript needs a serious improvement of the English in order to better understand the study. I corrected some sentences but the manuscript must be rephrased.
Lines 17-28. Over the last half-century of lunar exploration vast amounts of images and spectral data were collected, as well as data describing the topography, gravity and magnetism.
Lines 29-32. delete
Lines 31-32. The use of multi-source data allowed to reconstruct the geological history of the lunar craters, among the most noticeable geomorphological features on the Moon
Lines 34-36. the sentence is confusing. We suggest to rephrase it.
Lines 42-44. I suggest to rephrase, for instance: Before the gravity model derived from doppler tracking of the Lunar Prospector (LP) spacecraft, mascons were distributed at equatorial latitudes on the lunar nearside, filled with mare.
Line 45. replace “around” with “in”
Line 45. …on the Moon: three of them…
Line 51. change “more” with “additional”
Line 57. Remove “but”
Line 62. To study the Copernicus..
Line 65. Gravitational and topographical data
Line 65-66. Specify “Few of them”. Do you refer to studies? Apart that, the sentence is not clear, rephrase.
Line 72-74. Rephrase
Line 79. “The large size”, It is not clear to what you are referring to.
Line 88. Suggestion:“In the south-eastern area of Copernicus crater, a buried basin is present, called C-H[13]. The classification of the basin’s type and the diameter is uncertain [10, 13, 17, 21].”
Line 99. Change “analysis” with “analyse”
Line 114-116. I suggest to cut the sentence and create more sentences for a better clarity
Lines 189-191. Also this sentence is confusing. Rephrase.
Lines 191-192. “basin type and center are the same”. Please, use a more precise expression. I suggest, for instance, “The results of Liu et al. confirm the basin type and the location of the central part of the basin, but they provide different values for the rim-to-rim diameter (483 km) and for the ring diameter (221 km).
Lines 193-194. Remove “Both of them are much larger than those of Neu-193 mann et al.”. It is clear from the previous sentence
Line 194. Remove “with”
Lines 195-197. Which data analyzed Klokočník et al. to estimate the diameter of the C-H basin?
Lines 201-202. “ at the north east part of Neumann’s basin rim two rims are still visible, as can be observed in Figure 4.”
Lines 243-244. Add the reference for this sentence
Lines 262-263. Add the reference also for this sentence
Line 271. You have already explained the acronym DMD at line 257, you can remove “Dark Mantling Deposit”
Line 275. “Rather than a continuum deposit”. This sentence has no sense. Rephrase
Line 284. Peak-ring basin
Line 296. I suggest to change “we believe” in more appropriate expression, such as “from our results, C-H basin has a rim diameter of.. and a peak ring diameter of…”
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)
The revised manuscript has addressed all my concerns and thus I recommend it for publication.
Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)
I thank the authors for addressing my comments.
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper investigates multi data sources to attempt to determine the age and structure of the mare-buried crater or basin informally called Basin C-H by previous authors; that name should be used here to avoid confusion. There are two major unwarranted assumptions that make the main result uncertain. First, Section 2.4 states that the oldest age on a CSFD graph is the age of basin formation. This is an unwarranted assumption for there may be many different flows of lava so that the oldest CSFD event may not be the underlying basin formation age. Section 3.4 states that the floor and wall of Copernicus HC crater are totally different spectrally. It is not the wall that is different, it is the ejecta, that has previously been determined to come from buried basalts.
Section 4.2 states that the parameters for the equation to determine basalt thickness were set to match what they want to find. Maybe that is not correct but from the English used it sounds like it. The sentence before suggests it, "But in their result different parameters combination leaded to widely different results."
Please refer to the attachment for further comments.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
I am adding my annotated pdf.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
