Moon's biggest crater exposes its hidden lower crust

Written by: Super Admin
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Washington, March 5 (ANI): Reports indicate that the biggest and deepest crater on the Moon can provide glimpses of the hidden lower crust of Earth's natural satellite.

Shortly after the Moon formed, an asteroid smacked into its southern hemisphere and gouged out a truly enormous crater, the South Pole-Aitken basin, almost 1,500 miles across and more than five miles deep.



Fortunately, a crater on the edge of the South Pole-Aitken basin may provide just such a view.

According to Noah Petro of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, "We believe the central part of the Apollo Basin may expose a portion of the Moon's lower crust. If correct, this may be one of just a few places on the Moon where we have a view into the deep lunar crust, because it's not covered by volcanic material as many other such deep areas are."


Petro and his team made the discovery with the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), a NASA instrument on board India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar-orbiting spacecraft.

Analysis of the light (spectra) in images from this instrument revealed that portions of the interior of Apollo have a similar composition to the impact melt in the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin.

As you go deeper into the Moon, the crust contains minerals have greater amounts of iron. When the Moon first formed, it was largely molten.


"The asteroid that created the SPA basin probably carved through the crust and perhaps into the upper mantle. The impact melt that solidified to form the central floor of SPA would have been a mixture of all those layers," said Petro.

"We expect to see that it has slightly more iron than the bottom of Apollo, since it went deeper into the crust. This is what we found with M3," he said.

"However, we also see that this area in Apollo has more iron than the surrounding lunar highlands, indicating Apollo has uncovered a layer of the lunar crust between what is typically seen on the surface and that in the deepest craters like SPA," he added. (ANI)

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