I think the Moon watched Bad Universe

Nature imitates art! Kinda!

I am endlessly fascinated by impact craters. You might think they all look alike, but they don’t. They have different shapes, structures, shading, even (sometimes) colors. And these features can tell us a lot about the object that caused the impact as well as the structure of the surface they hit.

For example, here’s a nifty crater on the Moon as seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:

That image is 500 meters (.3 miles) across, so this is a decent-sized hole [click it to enlunanate]. Note the rubble; that’s a clear indication that the surface of the Moon where the object hit was rocky as opposed to sandy. You only get fractured boulders like that when the impacted surface has some cohesion. Most of the Moon is covered with a layer of dust called regolith, but here, under that powdery surface, was rock.

I’m not a geologist, so that wasn’t the first thing I thought of when I saw this picture. What I did think of was how familiar this crater looked to me. And it didn’t take me long to figure out why…

That’s a picture of me ...

Full story at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/14/i-think-the-moon-watched-bad-universe/