A team of planetary geologists led from Brown University (USA) has produced a new global catalog of the large craters on the Moon that will help better understand the large-scale bombardment that characterized the early Solar System more than 4,000 years ago. million years. The study is published in the latest issue of the journal Science.
The craters of the Moon reflect that our satellite has withstood abombardment of comets and asteroids throughout its history. Now, researchers from Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and NASA have created adetailed record of the history of Moon impactswith data provided by theprobeLunar Reconnaissance Orbiter(LRO)from NASA. It is a new global catalog of large lunar craters that could shed light on the large-scale planetary bombardment that occurred more than 4 billion years ago in the Solar System.
The equipment has used the data from the instrumentLunar Orbiter Laser Altimeterof the LRO to identify andmap 5,185 craters with a diameter of 20 kilometers in diameter or greater. The study has been based on highly accurate topographic measurements, rather than images, which is what has traditionally been used to build impact histories of the Moon. The researchers suggest that, in the future, their analysis of the Moon’s surface could alsouncover secrets of Earth’s early history.
According to the new catalog of craters, everything indicates that the regions with the highest density of craters on the Moon have reached states of “equilibrium by saturation”, which means that each additional crater destroys a previous one so that the number of craters, of In fact, it remains the same over time. Once this saturation equilibrium is reached, that region of the lunar surface can no longer be dated with crater-counting techniques.
However, scientists identify two areas of the Moon, the near south face and the far north-central face, as the oldest regions and those that have undergone the least modification since its formation. The team proposes these areas asgood goals for future missions, as they are likely to providethe oldest lunar samples.
With the catalog you can study the nature of comets, asteroids and other projectiles that have bombarded the lunar surface for billions of years. According to the authors, the lunar highlands contain more density of large craters than small ones, and the projectiles that had previously struck the Moon were usually larger than the more recent ones. The transition of projectiles from larger fragments to smaller ones appears to have taken place about 3.8 billion years ago.
The LRO probe was launched into space in June last year and began sending its first images of Earth’s natural satellite 15 days later.
