Lunar Landscaping

The Man in the Moon has an enormous right eye: the crater known as the Imbrium Basin, which is 1,200 kilometer across. The cavity was created roughly four billion years ago during a collision with something big, says Peter H. Schultz, a planetary geoscientist at Brown University who published a new...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific American 2016-10, Vol.315 (5), p.16-16
Main Author: Smith, Karl J. P.
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
ADVANCES
Astronomy
Collisions
Moon
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The Man in the Moon has an enormous right eye: the crater known as the Imbrium Basin, which is 1,200 kilometer across. The cavity was created roughly four billion years ago during a collision with something big, says Peter H. Schultz, a planetary geoscientist at Brown University who published a new estimate of the object's heft in Nature. To figure out the impactor's dimensions, Schultz and his colleague David A. Crawford turned to the surface features of the moon--in particular the grooves that emanate from the collision site, which were carved by flying chunks of the impactor. The researchers used measurements of those grooves and laboratory experiments to calculate the rock's size, speed and impact angle. The updated magnitude is 10 times more massive than previous estimates.
ISSN:0036-8733
1946-7087
DOI:10.1038/scientificamerican1116-16