Sentences with phrase «of craters on the moon»

THE shattered remnants of a dwarf planet may have bombarded the inner planets in the early solar system, suggests a new analysis of craters on the moon.

As is the case with viewing the moon's terminator line, the change in light casts shadows, allowing viewers to see many features in three dimensions (like being able to see the depth of craters on the moon).

The blinking slide sequence includes images drawn from Leavitt's original annotated photographic plates of variable stars, archival images from the «Human Computers» workplace, and a series of over 20 images of craters on the moon named after women astronomers.

Not exact matches

He found mountains and craters on the moon, and this contradicted the Aristotelian belief that the face of the moon was uniformly bright.

Those of you who have been living in a crater on the moon since 1905 will wonder why this matters.

The large tan splotch just below and to the right of the South Pole is the two - hundred - mile - wide Schrodinger crater, one of the few areas on the moon that shows signs of relatively recent volcanic activity.

Discovering molecular hydrogen on the moon was a surprise result from NASA's Lunar Crater Observation Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, which crash - landed the LCROSS satellite's spent Centaur rocket at 5,600 miles per hour into the Cabeus crater in the permanently shadowed region of the moon.

Since the 1960's scientists thought that only in permanently shadowed areas in craters near the lunar poles was it cold enough to accumulate this volatile material, but recent observations by a number of spacecraft, including LRO, suggest that hydrogen on the moon is more widespread.

Using data gathered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission, scientists believe they have solved a mystery from one of the solar system's coldest regions — a permanently shadowed crater on the moon.

But our moon's rotational bulge — an equatorial diameter that would be, on average, about 200 meters longer than its diameter through the poles if the moon weren't so cratered with huge basins — is about 20 times larger than expected, based on its current once - per - month rate of rotation.

Beneath the water and sediment, the impact scar looks strikingly similar to Schrödinger crater on the far side of the moon.

Radar signals bounced off a crater on the moon's south pole by the US Clementine spacecraft in 1994 hinted at the presence of water ice.

The data provide a clearer picture of dents on the moon's surface formed by impact craters, researchers report October 30 in Science Advances.

Furthermore, Schultz's work suggests fragments from these giants could account for a many of the impacts that occurred during a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment, which occurred from about 3.8 billion years ago to around 4 billion years, when scientists think most of the craters we see on the Moon and Mercury were formed.

Brilliant streaks on the crater walls suggest that even the feeble gravity of this moon is strong enough to erode loose material; bluish regions near the crater rim may be younger exposed surfaces.

When the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past Jupiter and its moons in 1979, it showed that Europa's surface is surprisingly free of impact craters, which suggests it is somehow recycling the ice on its surface.

Kerberos was one of two little satellites that Star Trek actor William Shatner hoped would be named Vulcan, after the home world of Mr. Spock; although Shatner didn't get his wish, he might be pleased to know that craters on Pluto's largest moon, Charon, have been tentatively named Kirk, Spock, Sulu, and Uhura, all located in a region called Vulcan Planum.

They also constrained the strength of Phobos based on results from simulations of the 10 - kilometer diameter Stickney impact crater, which formed in the past when a rock rammed into Phobos without quite smashing the moon apart.

In that sense, the researchers say, the moon is unique: Its craters are constantly erased by the solar system's most relentless volcanic activity — 25 times more frequent than that seen on Earth — which adds an estimated 1 centimeter of fresh material to Io's surface each year.

Dayton Jones and Thomas Kuiper, radio astronomers at JPL, have sketched a plan for deploying a rover to build a VLF radio telescope - essentially a huge network of wires acting as radio - wave receivers - in a crater on the lunar farside, where the moon's bulk blots out Earth's radio noise.

Multi-ringed craters are known on the Moon; the inner ring corresponds to the central peak in smaller craters, while the intermediate 210 - kilometre ring may be the edge of the original hole.

And yet, some of Mercury's craters have streaks of ejecta comparable in length to those found on the moon.

Charon is one of the larger bodies in the Kuiper Belt, and has a wealth of geological features, as well as a collection of craters similar to those seen on most moons.

What scientists know about such collisions is based mainly on a limited survey of craters around the world and on the moon.

Almost 8 centuries later, a relatively young crater — dubbed Giordano Bruno, after the heretic who was burned at the stake in Rome for arguing that planets orbit other stars — was discovered on the far side of the moon by the Soviet spacecraft Lunik III.

Galileo was the first to turn the telescope skyward, leading to the discovery of Jupiter's satellites and craters on the moon.

We see many craters on the moon because it doesn't have much of an atmosphere.

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.

Having taught astronomy for nearly two decades, I read with interest Paul Taylor's criticism of Bob Berman concerning the lopsided cratering on the moon [Letters, March].

«For reasons that we're not totally sure about, the same properties can arise from the scattering of rocky ejecta on the blocky terrain of young impact craters on the moon,» Campbell notes.

Right now lot of people are using computational codes to simulate the event, but what I'd like to do is that actually do the whole scale event in small scale; and that way we'll understand why craters look like [they] it do on places like the Moon, Mercury and Mars and Venus; and what might happen to the Earth if we got hit by the next big one.

The cratering record on the moon provides a proxy for similar impacts by interplanetary debris such as comets and asteroids on Earth, the effects of which have largely been erased by billions of years of erosion and geologic activity.

The kind of asteroid needed to form the Martian dichotomy would fall in between that size and those of the rocks that formed other large craters, such as the South Pole — Aitken impact basin on the moon and the Hellas Basin in Mars's southern hemisphere, both more than 1,30 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide.

Those three mountains are actually the central peaks of the crater Bhabha, a 64 kilometer (40 mile) wide impact scar on the far side of the Moon.

A spent rocket stage that NASA sent hurtling into the moon last year in hopes of kicking up water from a polar crater delivered on that mission, revealing that at least a moderate portion of its target was indeed made of ice.

Studying the craters on the moon offers a window into that violent history of the young solar system that is not nearly as accessible on Earth.

A NASA spacecraft charting the topography of the moon in exceptional detail has produced a catalogue of lunar craters that traces billions of years of impact history on the moon.

Unlike its sibling moons, Callisto has no large - scale processes for erasing craters; some may fade as the underlying ice evaporates, but most simply sit on top of earlier scars.

He first used it to observe the moon and see the shadows cast by its mountains and craters; he went on to catalogue sunspots; and he discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter — Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto — that are now known as the Galilean moons in his honor.

Large craters cover more of the moon's surface on its nearside than its farside, according to new maps from NASA's GRAIL spacecrafts.

The GRAIL data also suggest that astronomers should not use measurements of the basins on the nearside of the moon to draw conclusions about the rate at which craters struck the planets of the inner solar system 4 billion years ago, the researchers report November 8 in Science.

But the buildup of heat from the decay of radioactive elements in the interior then remelted parts of the mantle, which began to erupt onto the surface some 500 million years after the Moon's formation, pooling in impact craters and basins to form the maria, most of which are on the side of the Moon facing the Earth.

Those results set the age boundary for the oldest terrains on Mercury to be contemporary with the so - called Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB), a period of intense asteroid and comet impacts recorded in lunar and asteroidal rocks and by the numerous craters on the Moon, Earth, and Mars, as well as Mercury.

Team members then extrapolated to Mercury a model that was originally developed for comparing the Moon's crater distribution to a chronology based on the ages of rock samples gathered during the Apollo missions.

Astronomers have long known that the craters visible on moons were caused by the impact of other bodies, billions of years ago.

The moon's craters preserve a valuable record of the LHB, whose effects have largely been erased on Earth by weathering and geologic resurfacing.

They carefully mapped the positions of features on Enceladus — mostly craters — across hundreds of images, in order to measure changes in the moon's rotation with extreme precision.

Dr. Chapman has been the Principal Investigator of many NASA and NSF grants and has been P.I. of research concerning the Late Heavy Bombardment of the Moon (and inner solar system), astronomical observations of very young asteroid families, analysis of NEAR Shoemaker images of Eros, studies of secondary cratering on Mars, and investigations of the cratering records of the Galilean satellites.

«Moon Over Mars: I snapped a pic of one of Mars» moons, Phobos, in the twilight sky over Gale crater,» NASA's Curiosity team announced on the mission's Twitter page @MarsCuriosity, writing as the rover itself, on Wednesday (Sept. 26)-- the same day Curiosity made its longest drive yet.

Scientists thought most of Vesta outside the south polar region might be flat like the Moon, yet some of the craters outside that region formed on very steep slopes and have nearly vertical sides, with landslides often occurring in the regolith, the deep layer of crushed rock on the surface.