If I ask you to close your eyes and picture a crater on the Moon, I bet what would come to your mind is a bowl-shaped depression, a raised rim, and maybe a central peak. You might also picture the surrounding area, which looks pretty featureless except for other craters.
I would also bet you wouldn’t picture anything like this:
Isn’t that lovely? [Click to enlunanate.] Looking like a kilometer-wide flower on the lunar surface, it’s an unnamed crater just south of Mare Crisium, on the Moon’s eastern limb near the equator. This image, from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, spans a distance of about 2.2 km (1.3 miles) across and the full-res image has a resolution of roughly 1.5 meters per pixel.
It’s not your run-of-the-mill crater. It’s surrounded by the material that was ejected when a small asteroid (or comet) slammed into the Moon. The impact excavated something on the order of a million tons of rock, blasting it off the surface and into the sky. The plume was thickest in the middle, right over the crater, and thinned with distance. It settled in those streaks, ...
Full story at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/05/11/a-flower-bloom-on-the-moon/
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment