Arizona State University | 2016 Oct 12
Study reveals surface features younger than assumed; potential structures would need better protection
The Moon’s surface is being “gardened” -- churned by small impacts -- more than 100 times faster than scientists previously thought. This means that surface features believed to be young are perhaps even younger than assumed. It also means that any structures placed on the Moon as part of human expeditions will need better protection.
This new discovery comes from more than seven years of high-resolution lunar images studied by a team of scientists from Arizona State University and Cornell University. The team is led by ASU’s Emerson Speyerer, who is also the lead author of the scientific paper published October 13 in Nature.
“Before the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched in 2009, we thought that it took hundreds of thousands to millions of years to change the lunar surface layer significantly,” Speyerer said. “But we’ve discovered that the Moon’s uppermost surface materials are completely turned over in something like 80,000 years.”
The images used in the discovery come from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. LROC is run from the Science Operations Center on ASU’s Tempe campus; the instrument’s principal investigator is Mark Robinson, a professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE). Robinson is a co-author on the paper along with Reinhold Povilaitis and Robert Wagner, both SESE research specialists, and Peter Thomas of Cornell. ...
Quantifying crater production and regolith overturn on the Moon with temporal imaging - Emerson J. Speyerer et al
- Nature 538(7624):215 (13 Oct 2016) DOI: 10.1038/nature19829