Sentences with phrase «cratered lunar surface»

The cratered lunar surface breaks up the slender slice of light peeking through, resulting in a bumpy appearance.

Not exact matches

That's potentially problematic, because planetary scientists use the number of small impact craters to estimate the age of the lunar surface.

Here radar waves from the Lunar Radar Sounder reveal structures below the surface of a moon crater called Poisson.

Exquisite telescopic photographs of the lunar surface had existed for decades before the Apollo missions to the Moon, but they did not resolve the controversy of the origin of lunar craters were they formed by meteorite impact or by volcanic eruption?

The seismographs left on the moon's surface by the Apollo astronauts and the gravity measurements of the 1998 Lunar Prospector probe have provided enough data to explain why there are many more craters on the moon's far side than on the near side.

Lava flows three billion or four billion years ago, for instance, flooded lunar plains and filled craters there, whereas large impacts excavated vast amounts of lunar material that fell to the surface, burying or obscuring nearby craters.

But it also overwrote parts of the cratering record up to 500 kilometers away from the basin, reducing crater counts over an area of roughly three million square kilometers, or about 8 percent of the lunar surface.

In the final minutes of its plunge toward the moon, NASA's LCROSS spacecraft spotted the brief infrared flash of a rocket booster hitting the lunar surface just ahead of it — and it even saw heat from the crater formed by the impact.

«By comparing the measured craters to the number and spatial distribution of large impact basins on Mercury, we found that they started to accumulate at about the same time, suggesting that the resetting of Mercury's surface was global and likely due to volcanism,» said lead author Dr. Simone Marchi, who has a joint appointment between two of NASA's Lunar Science Institutes, one at the SwRI in Boulder and another at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

NASA»S Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has spied a new crater on the lunar surface; one made from the impact of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) misLunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has spied a new crater on the lunar surface; one made from the impact of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mislunar surface; one made from the impact of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) misLunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission.