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Dramatic Sunrise Over Moon’s Tycho Crater Mountains

A spacecraft circling the moon snapped this dramatic image of the sun rising on the mountains in the middle of Tycho crater.

The 51-mile-wide depression is all that remains of a catastrophic asteroid impact 108 million years ago. Planetary scientists think the guilty asteroid was a fragment from a larger space rock, another piece of which wiped out the dinosaurs.

The crater’s 1.24-mile-high central peaks, photographed June 10 by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, barely protrude halfway up into the hole left by the impact. They weren’t made by rock bouncing upward. Instead, liquefied rock at the crater’s rim sagged inward immediately after the impact and pushed up the central peaks.

Surveyor 7 is the only U.S. spacecraft to land nearby. After touching down on the crater’s outer rim, it used a TV camera to beam back the first from-the-ground images of the monotone wasteland.

Image: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University [high-resolution version available]

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