LRO HD Moon

[GedZep]

Hi all, I'm sure many have seen this, but here's a link for those that haven't. I thought it was truly beautiful

[smartcooky]

Interesting shot this (at around 1:30 on the video)




The bright crater on the bottom right quadrant appears to be very deep, and the two craters at 2 o'clock and 5 o'clock to it are partially filled in. Also to the right in that quadrant (from about 1 o'clock to about 4 o'clock), you can see faint radial patterns in the lunar dust. This would seem to indicate that the bright crater must have been a relatively recent impact by comparison with the other two.

Were those craters filled in by material from the impact that formed the bright crater?
Were they filled in gradually over many millions of years of falling space-dust
Were they filled by some other process?

Also, there are some channels/cracks with a particularly large one emanating from the crater a 8 o'clock from the bright crater.

What could have caused those channels? Flowing molten lunar material from the impact? Ancient water flow? Was the surface cracked by the impact?

[ajv]

Aristarchus. Wikipedia says it was formed 450 million years ago and identifies a bunch of probably secondary impact craters.

Here's a map of the features.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_(crater)#/media/File:Aristarchus_satellite_craters.jpg

[bknight]

Aristarchus. Wikipedia says it was formed 450 million years ago and identifies a bunch of probably secondary impact craters.

Here's a map of the features.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_(crater)#/media/File:Aristarchus_satellite_craters.jpg

From that image it may be a low angle impact judging from the rays of debris emanating from the crater.

[Zakalwe]

The rille is Vallis Schroteri is the largest valley on the Moon an is thought to have formed by a lava flow which eroded the substrate.

The ghost craters, Aristarchas F (directly below the bright Aristarchus) and Prinz (to the right and above Aristarchus) were formed when lava flows flooded the craters and partially eroded their feature. The volcanic vent that is thought to have flooded Prinz is just above and slightly to the right of the crater's centreline.

The whole area is fascinating from a Lunar geology point of view. Aristarchus is a relatively new crater, some 450 million years old and is the site of radon gas emissions and transient Lunar phenomena.

If this stuff is of interest then it's worth downloading the Virtual Moon Atlas. You can add high resolution data to the base program with 120 metre resolution data sets available form the LRO down to 60 metre resolution from Chang'e 2 probe.