Characterization of Meter-to Hectometer-Scale Craters and Centimeter-Sized Rocks in the Chang'e-6 Landing Site Measured From Descent Imagery

China's Chang'e-6 (CE-6) probe successfully landed in the Apollo Basin within the South Pole-Aitken Basin on 2 June 2024 (Beijing Time), and returned the first lunar farside samples in human history. The descent camera captured hundreds of high-resolution images during the descending and landing. High-resolution digital orthophoto map (DOM) and digital terrain model (DTM) were generated from these images. We created catalogs of meter-to-hectometer craters and centimeter-sized rocks from the generated DOMs and DTMs of 0.03 m/pixel (Map-1) and 0.3 m/pixel (Map-2) resolutions. The distribution and morphological characteristics of craters and rocks were analyzed, including completeness diameter, spatial density, crater type, depth/diameter ratio, and rock abundance. By recognizing and measuring concentric craters, we estimated a median regolith thickness of 1.85 m in the Map-2 area. The relatively thin lunar regolith resulted in most craters reaching the high-strength substrate during the cratering process, which is the primary reason for the lower depth/diameter ratio (0.116) of the fresh CE-6 crater compared with other landing areas (e.g., 0.15 at CE-5 landing site). Size analysis of the rocks revealed that the CE-6 landing site has a rock abundance of 0.179%, which is close to the value (0.21%) of the CE-4 landing site. Based on the ejecta thickness model and diffusion function, we found that the ejecta from a relatively fresh 4.7 m diameter crater is likely to be present in the uppermost layer of the sampling location. The data set generated in this study is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14920942.