Moon's 'Turbulent Youth' Exposed In NASA LRO Imagery (PICTURES)

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has returned data that gives scientists new insight into the moon's complex and turbulent history.

Three papers on the data were published in the September 17 issue of Science. One, authored by James Head of Brown University, examined detailed topographical data obtained by the LRO's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA), which bounced lasers off the scarred surface of the moon. Head said, according to NASA:

Our new LRO LOLA dataset shows that the older highland impactor population can be clearly distinguished from the younger population in the lunar 'maria' -- giant impact basins filled with solidified lava flows [...] The highlands have a greater density of large craters compared to smaller ones, implying that the earlier population of impactors had a proportionally greater number of large fragments than the population that characterized later lunar history.

The Moon's ancient craters have remained relatively untouched, except by other impacts, NASA reports. These craters can provide clues to the history of Earth, where wind, water and tectonic shifts erode or erase impact craters. "The moon is thus analogous to a Rosetta stone for understanding the bombardment history of the Earth," said Head. "Like the Rosetta stone, the lunar record can be used to translate the 'hieroglyphics' of the poorly preserved impact record on Earth."

Head, who identified 5,185 craters on the Moon, believes his findings support the theory that the Moon "was bombarded by two distinct populations of asteroids or comets in its youth," though some of his peers disagree, writes New Scientist.

Scientists have used the LRO data to create what NASA calls "the first-ever comprehensive catalog of large craters on the moon."

The images below are of lunar topographical maps.

Image credit: NASA/Goddard/MIT/Brown

Comments

[KarateKid]

10:56 PM on 09/21/2010

The moon has the same complexion as Jan Brewer.

[NonSequiturArtista]

06:32 PM on 09/21/2010

Why do otherwise rational scientists irrationally assert that there's "junk" in the universe?

[Tunghoy]

02:58 PM on 09/21/2010

I'd like to know why the Earthward side of the moon is so much more cratered than the far side of the moon. I would think the opposite would be the case, since meteors attracted to the combined Earth/Luna gravity well would be more likely to hit the moon's far side.

[PlayTOE]

06:03 PM on 09/21/2010

Over the years the average impact size has decreased.

The earth side of the moon shows older larger impacts.
The far side shows smaller younger impacts.

Since the earth and moon have been rotationally locked earth has been shielding the near side of the moon reducing the incidents of smaller impact strikes and leaving old scars more visible.

[palindrom]

06:39 PM on 09/21/2010

After Shoemaker-Levey struck Jupiter I heard a really interesting talk once in which a guy counted all the curious little crater chains on the moon and found many more of these little straight chains on the _near_ side. The reason? Asteroids in close approach to earth get torn apart by tidal forces (they're mostly loose conglomerations) and stretched into a straight line, and some of these hit the moon on the way out. He got the idea after seeing how Shoemaker-Levey got strung out by Jupiter.

[wadda]

12:27 PM on 09/21/2010

Cool!

[SiriusMrE]

12:08 PM on 09/21/2010

Why are all of those craters so nearly perfectly circular? Was each one created by an object that fell perfectly perpendicularly to the surface? What about "rayed" craters like Tycho (conspicuously absent from these views)? Is that an "impact crater," too? What if they are not "impact craters," but electrical scars?

"When seeking to test a hypothesis, it is helpful to start with clear and undeniable facts. But when the impact theory is applied to the prominent lunar 'rayed crater', Tycho, the theory fails even the most obvious tests."
http://thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060308crater.htm

And what about all of the lunar craters associated with rilles and crater chains?
http://thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060310crater.htm

[palindrom]

02:35 PM on 09/21/2010

Hello, SirusME! This is like talking to a wall, but for the benefit of everyone else -- impactors come in so fast that their specific energy is much greater than high explosive. When they hit, they create an essentially spherical blast wave, regardless of what direction they come from.

The problem with the whole electric universe theory is that it is physically preposterous in too many ways to count; it richly earns the designation "crankiest" on crank.net. The proponents remind me of anti-evolutionists who point at picky details that scientists may not fully understand, and then claim that because this _one thing_ isn't completely understood, then the _whole edifice of science_ must be completely wrong. Centuries of work by the greatest scientists have resulted in solid, clear explanations of many astronomical phenomena, which are supported by exquisitely accurate measurements, but this is all ignored by the thunderbolts people. Obviously, not everything is understood, but that doesn't mean that (for example) stars shine because of ohmic dissipation of Birkeland currents.

[SiriusMrE]

04:20 PM on 09/21/2010

"[P]hysically preposterous," you say? In which ways, exactly? Give me three. Will you deny that electricity is 39 orders of magnitude--this is like talking to a wall, but for the benefit of everyone else, that's one million trillion trillion trillion trillion times--greater than gravity? Do you have any links to impactor tests that produce the varied population of supposed impact craters that we observe?

BTW, there is a place for gravity in Plasma Cosmology, just not at the center of it all.

Also, Galileo was once considered the "crankiest" on his time's version of crank.net, too...How'd that turn out?

[SiriusMrE]

04:51 PM on 09/21/2010

Also, science is very important to me. I will not write that I "believe in" science, because belief is not required for something to be measurably true. We must guard ourselves against the complacent belief that the work that some true giants in the field have contributed is the Gospel. We know more now; some of the things that we can observe now would call into question some of the assumptions that went into creating some of the gas-light era theories that we continue to cling to.

We must remember that science in and of itself is not objective. It is purely a reflection of Man's current thoughts about nature, his intensely homo- and geo-centric ruminations on the nature of the Universe. If we change the way that we think about the Universe, the Universe changes.

[Tunghoy]

02:49 PM on 09/21/2010

A 5-minute excursion on Google will yield plenty of scientific papers debunking the "electric universe" theory. It's junk science, like creationism.

[SiriusMrE]

04:27 PM on 09/21/2010

Electrical engineering is junk science, eh? At the risk of getting into a game of "I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I?" I would argue that the Big Bang is the junk science in this discussion. So would Eric Lerner ( http://bigbangneverhappened.org/p25.htm ) and Stehen Crothers ( http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/ ).

And, again, helio-centrism was "junk science" once upon a time, too...

[PlayTOE]

11:44 PM on 09/20/2010

The larger craters generally have smaller craters superimposed over them showing that there is a general trend towards smaller impacts over time.

As earth is in the same location as the moon, it would be reasonable to expect a similar number of large strikes on earth as we see on the moon. These are mostly eroded or covered, but we should expect to find many ancient and even modern impact zones if we search for them.

[palindrom]

02:26 PM on 09/21/2010

The oceanic crust has been recycled so many times it's hard to see anything, and the continental crust is also mostly not all that old -- an interesting exception is the Candian Shield, where you can see some very large impact sites.

[PlayTOE]

03:48 PM on 09/21/2010

The Canadian shield impact zones are particularly rich mining locations.

[frank day]

11:43 PM on 09/20/2010

It really does look Swiss cheesy.

[LMPE]

11:27 PM on 09/20/2010

If you look closely, the moon looks like an orange turtle. Mitch McConnell crossed with John Boehner