Galileo built his first telescope in late , and turned it to the Moon for the first time on November 30, He discovered that, contrary to general opinion at that time, the Moon was not a perfect sphere, but had both mountains and cup-like depressions. These were named craters by Schroeter , extending its previous use with volcanoes. Scientific opinion as to the origin of craters swung back and forth over the ensuing centuries. The competing theories were a volcanic eruptions blasting holes in the Moon, b meteoric impact, c a theory known as the Welteislehre developed in Germany between the two World Wars which suggested glacial action creating the craters. Grove Karl Gilbert suggested in that the Moon’s craters were formed by large asteroid impacts. Ralph Baldwin in wrote that the Moon’s craters were mostly of impact origin. Around , Gene Shoemaker revived the idea. According to David H. Levy , Gene “saw the craters on the Moon as logical impact sites that were formed not gradually, in eons , but explosively, in seconds.

Crater counting

Crater Chains Crater chains are unusual features composed of linear rows of small craters. One of the best examples is Catena Davy , “Davy Chain” left C G9, which extends some 50 km and contains over 20 craterlets, most with diameters under 2 km. It was probably created by near simultaneous multiple impacts, similar to the Shoemaker-Levy-9 comet impact on Jupiter in Another nice example is Catena Abulfeda C J10 which extends for km. Double craters created by near simultaneous double impact are a related feature.

Other crater chains appear to have been caused by secondary impacts of ejecta thrown out by large impacts.

Oct 14,  · These eruptions mean that parts of the surface are younger than others, and you can see them with your naked eye: the lunar maria, those dark patches surrounding the higher, crater .

It’s no secret that Mars is a beaten and battered planet – astronomers have been peering for centuries at the violent impact craters created by cosmic buckshot pounding its surface over billions of years. But just how beat up is it? Really beat up, according to a University of Colorado Boulder research team that recently finished counting, outlining and cataloging a staggering , impact craters on Mars that are roughly a kilometer or more in diameter.

Scroll down for video: History written on its face: The surface of Mars is covered with thousands upon thousands of crater impacts over the planet’s life As the largest single database ever compiled of impacts on a planet or moon in our solar system, the new information will be of help in dating the ages of particular regions of Mars, said CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Stuart Robbins, who led the effort.

The new crater atlas also should help researchers better understand the history of water volcanism on Mars through time, as well as the planet’s potential for past habitability by primitive life, he said. I basically analyzed maps and drew crater rim circles for four years. Cataloging the cratering of Mars and the moon is helping scientists understand a time a few hundred million years after the inner solar system formed, including an event about 3.

The asteroids litter the landscape – as they would on Earth except we have a geologically active world Robbins said most of the smaller diameter craters on Mars are younger than the largest craters and form the bulk of the planet’s crater population. Much of the planet has been ‘resurfaced’ by volcanic and erosional activity, essentially erasing older geological features, including craters. The new database also is expected to help planetary scientists better understand erosion on the planet, said Robbins, who earned his doctoral degree from CU-Boulder’s astrophysical and planetary sciences department.

NASA wants to know where the craters are and their particular features both from a safety and research standpoint. Since the most complete databases of lunar craters include only those roughly 10 to 15 kilometers in diameter or larger, and databases on Mercury’s craters contain only those over roughly 20 kilometers in diameter, it is difficult to compare them with the Martian crater database, said Robbins.

FAQ – Radioactive Age-Dating

Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, v. Ottawa Dominion Observatory Contributions, v. Geological Survey of Canada Bulletin, v.

Geophysical Research Letters; Global Biogeochemical Cycles; Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES).

By Phil Plait April 8, The Moon lacks water and air, but it has erosion nonetheless: Old craters have a rounded look to them, while fresher craters are sharp-edged, and show the debris from impact. The full-res image has a scale of just a meter per pixel, so a lot of the smaller boulders you see around the younger crater on the right are the size of cars.

Both craters are roughly or so meters across; you could walk briskly across them in a couple of minutes. I noticed the young crater has an odd shape, non-circular, almost diamond-shaped. Then I looked at other, nearby craters, and saw the same thing, so it must mostly be due to lighting. However, there is a funny hillock just to the right of the crater, and the boulder field around it is not symmetric; there are more above and below it. I wonder if there is a density change in the underlying rock just to the right of the crater, which helped shape the crater…?

That area is mostly flat lava flood plains, and in the zoomable and pannable larger-area context image there are some interesting features that look like very old crater rims poking up through the plain. One of my favorite things about LRO is the pile of high-res pictures like this one you can zoom in an out of.

The Lunar Landscape



Lunar craters named in honor of Apollo 8 Date: October 5, Source: International Astronomical Union Summary: The Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature of the International.

See my copyright notice for fair use practices. The Earth’s lithosphere is broken up into chunks called plates with densities around 3. Oceanic crust is only about 6 kilometers thick. The continental plates are made of another volcanic type of silicates called granite. Continental crust is much thicker than oceanic crust up to 35 kilometers thick. Continental plates are less dense than the oceanic plates.

Wabar craters

As a terrestrial planet, Earth is located within the Inner Solar System between between Venus and Mars which are also terrestrial planets. But the most remarkable thing about our planet is its diversity. Not only are there an endless array of plants, animals, avians, insects and mammals, but they exist in every terrestrial environment. So how exactly did Earth come to be the fertile, life-giving place we all know and love?

The moon is the standard by which to estimate the number of craters on the earth. The number of craters greater than 30 km by evolutionary age categories is about 1, Scaling to the earth and considering the greater gravitational cross section results in 36, craters greater than 30 km. Based.

Every time the Moon goes around us it passes through perigee and apogee namely, once every Every year there is a full Moon which is fairly close within a day or two of perigee, and bigger than usual; and about half a year earlier and later, there is a full Moon which is fairly close within a day or two of apogee, and smaller than usual. What was unusual about the full Moon of March 19, is that it occured almost exactly at the same time as perigee, so it was a smidgen closer than usual for a perigee full Moon, and therefore a smidgen bigger.

As shown in the images below, the perigee Moon looks quite a bit larger than the apogee Moon, both in height as shown clearly in the composite image and in width which isn’t as obvious, but is just as big a difference. Being that much larger makes it look that much brighter as well. Unfortunately, a recent NASA press release image comparing the apparent size and brightness of the perigee and apogee Moon correctly showed the two as being of different sizes, but incorrectly showed the smaller Moon as also looking darker.

Lunar mare

In the absence of either an atmosphere or a magnetic field,… Distinctive features The Moon is a spherical rocky body, probably with a small metallic core, revolving around Earth in a slightly eccentric orbit at a mean distance of about , km , miles. Its equatorial radius is 1, km 1, miles , and its shape is slightly flattened in a such a way that it bulges a little in the direction of Earth.


3. We have discussed two basic techniques for determining the age of a planetary surface: studying the abundance of impact craters and radiometric dating of surface rocks.

Share this article Share Reiffel, now 85, directed the inquiry at the former Armour Research Foundation, now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. He later served as a deputy director at NASA. Would you miss it? American scientists were looking to blow up the moon to get an edge of the Soviet Union in the space race Sagan, who later became renowned for popularizing science on television, died in The author of one of Sagan’s biographies suggested that he may have committed a security breach in after revealing the classified project in an academic fellowship application.

Under the scenario, a missile carrying a small nuclear device was to be launched from an undisclosed location and travel , miles to the moon, where it would be detonated upon impact. The planners decided it would have to be an atom bomb because a hydrogen bomb would have been too heavy for the missile. Military officials apparently abandoned the idea because of the danger to people on Earth in case the mission failed.

How many? The pimply face of Mars has 635,000 impact craters (and counting) on its surface

But the agency will just be along for the ride. Rather than unveiling plans for its own spacecraft, NASA will name the private companies it will pay to carry science experiments to the moon on small robotic landers. Scientists are lining up for a ride. She and other attendees at the annual meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group in Columbia, Maryland, last week were eager to show NASA why their small experiments would be worthy hitchhikers on the landers.


The Planetary and Space Science Centre (PASSC) opened in April, and was the first facility of its kind in Canada.

Quick Views of Big Advances Absolute Ages of Mercury’s Surface Heavily cratered terrains—the oldest surfaces—on Mercury are the focus of new studies with cratering statistics that aim to bracket the bombardment and volcanic histories of the closest planet to the Sun. One of the regions studied by Marchi and colleagues is the northern heavily cratered terrains, outlined by the black line in the crater areal density map on the left where crater density is the number of craters at least 25 kilometers in diameter per , square kilometers.

Previous studies with older data found the most heavily cratered terrains had fewer craters radiometric dating of the Apollo lunar samples and lunar meteorites. Tweaking the lunar model for the differences in impact velocities, gravitational focusing, and crater scaling relationships at Mercury compared to the Moon, Marchi and coauthors find that the oldest surfaces on Mercury formed 4. Their work also indicates that widespread volcanism on Mercury decreased rapidly during the time of the Late Heavy Bombardment.

#LPSC2018: What the Moon’s craters tell us about Earth’s past climate



A secondary crater chain is simply a row or chain of secondary craters lined adjacent to one another. Likewise, a cluster is a population of secondaries near to one another. Likewise, a cluster is a population of secondaries near to one another.


The real question is when was the last time you really thought about the Moon? What is going on under that familiar crater-scarred surface? The lower left part of the image shows a portion of the Moon visible from Earth while the upper right area shows the heavily cratered lunar far side. Did you know that there is a pretty major conspiracy theory out there about our Moon? We know there are conspiracies on almost everything nowadays, but the moon?

Fear not, we are here to explain! Many people have asked this, and have been asking it since the first moon landings.

Lunar mare

March 18, No dark side, either. And if you think the moon is causing the wild moods of a certain someone, then read on It went like this: A giant Mars-sized object hit Earth 4.

Lacking actual samples from Mercury, the new cratering statistics provide relative ages of surface terrains, but to calibrate their data, the authors used a model for early lunar crater chronology that is based on radiometric dating of the Apollo lunar samples and lunar meteorites.

Table of Contents 4. Although they also posed new questions, the thousands of satellite photographs brought back from the Moon have permitted us to map its surface with greater accuracy than Earth could be mapped a few decades ago. We now have over kg of rocks from nine places on the Moon, rocks that have been analyzed by hundreds of scientists from many different countries.

Data from a variety of experiments have revealed much about the Moon’s deep interior. As it turns out, the Moon is truly a whole new world, with rocks and surface features that provide a record of events that occurred during the first billion years of the solar system. This record is not preserved on Earth because all rocks formed during the first million years of Earth’s history were recycled back into the interior. The importance of the Moon in studying the principles of geology is that it provides an insight into the basic mechanics of planetary evolution and events that occurred early in the solar system.

Much of the knowledge we have of how planets are born and of the events that transpired during the early part of their histories has been gained from studies of the Moon.

Moon Craters Debunked 100% Proof