A young lunar impact crater
Cool image time! The science team from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) today released a new image, taken on November 3, 2018, of a relatively young small crater not easily seen from Earth.
The unnamed crater, just 1.8 kilometers across, is too small to see from Earth with unaided eyes. It is in the Moon’s wild west, just past Oceanus Procellarum and close to the line dividing the nearside from the farside, so it would be hard to glimpse in any case. If you stood on the crater rim, you would see the Earth forever slowly bobbing up, down, and sideways close to the eastern horizon.
The image above is a cropped and reduced-in-resolution section of the released image. If you click on it you can see this section at full resolution.
What I find fascinating about this crater are the black streaks that appear to only run down the outside slopes of the eastern rim, but nowhere else. At first glance it looks like prevailing winds, blowing from the west, caused this, but of course that’s wrong because the Moon has no atmosphere. The website explains:
Notice the thin dark streamers of late-stage ejecta — material the small asteroid that excavated the crater lofted at a steep angle, so that it soared high and landed last, drawing fine lines on the just-deposited bright ejecta near the crater.
In other words, the impact hit the ground from an oblique angle, from the west, throwing up ejecta mostly to the east and thus producing these dark streaks. This does make sense, as research has shown that craters will still form circular pits, even if the impact comes from the side.
The full resolution image is very impressive, as you can zoom in and see many individual boulders. In fact, the interior of the crater is littered with them, With a resolution on the full image of about 16 feet per pixel, many of these boulders are house and mansion-sized, with much evidence of numerous avalanches and landslides within the crater.
Very rough country, indeed. And it gives a sense of the slowness of the lunar erosion processes, caused almost entirely by the solar wind and the tiny rain of micro-meteorites over eons. Though this crater is young, estimated to be about 100 million years old, it still looks fresh and rough. To smooth things out on the Moon will take many more hundreds of millions of years.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Cool image time! The science team from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) today released a new image, taken on November 3, 2018, of a relatively young small crater not easily seen from Earth.
The unnamed crater, just 1.8 kilometers across, is too small to see from Earth with unaided eyes. It is in the Moon’s wild west, just past Oceanus Procellarum and close to the line dividing the nearside from the farside, so it would be hard to glimpse in any case. If you stood on the crater rim, you would see the Earth forever slowly bobbing up, down, and sideways close to the eastern horizon.
The image above is a cropped and reduced-in-resolution section of the released image. If you click on it you can see this section at full resolution.
What I find fascinating about this crater are the black streaks that appear to only run down the outside slopes of the eastern rim, but nowhere else. At first glance it looks like prevailing winds, blowing from the west, caused this, but of course that’s wrong because the Moon has no atmosphere. The website explains:
Notice the thin dark streamers of late-stage ejecta — material the small asteroid that excavated the crater lofted at a steep angle, so that it soared high and landed last, drawing fine lines on the just-deposited bright ejecta near the crater.
In other words, the impact hit the ground from an oblique angle, from the west, throwing up ejecta mostly to the east and thus producing these dark streaks. This does make sense, as research has shown that craters will still form circular pits, even if the impact comes from the side.
The full resolution image is very impressive, as you can zoom in and see many individual boulders. In fact, the interior of the crater is littered with them, With a resolution on the full image of about 16 feet per pixel, many of these boulders are house and mansion-sized, with much evidence of numerous avalanches and landslides within the crater.
Very rough country, indeed. And it gives a sense of the slowness of the lunar erosion processes, caused almost entirely by the solar wind and the tiny rain of micro-meteorites over eons. Though this crater is young, estimated to be about 100 million years old, it still looks fresh and rough. To smooth things out on the Moon will take many more hundreds of millions of years.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
I propose to IAU that it be named Zimmerman Crater (places on the moon are supposed to be named after states of mind (ie: Sea of Tranquility) but when the Russians took the first photos of the far side of the moon, they wanted a crater named Moscow. The IAU agreed, which means that, to astronomers, Moscow is a state of mind (you can take that and run with it), so there is a precedent.)