Gardening Rates on the Moon
- Visualizations by:
- Ernie Wright
- View full credits
After simulating the distant view of a new impact, the camera zooms up to the surface to show actual before/after images of a new 12-meter crater taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter narrow-angle camera. (The impact that formed this crater wasn't seen from Earth, but a different one was.)
gardeningrefers to the mixing and disturbance of the top layers of lunar regolith that happens when impacts form new craters. The material excavated from the crater site is sprayed in all directions, creating secondary craters and splats of lighter and darker dust on the surface.
The narrow-angle camera (LROC NAC) aboard Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has photographed a large percentage of the Moon's surface multiple times. By looking for differences between earlier and later images, the LROC team has found over 200 new craters large enough for the camera to see (at least 5 meters in diameter), as well as thousands of what they call
splotches,many of which are likely caused by smaller craters.
In a paper in the October 13, 2016 Nature, Emerson Speyerer and his coauthors divide the crater ejecta into four zones that differ in brightness and distance from the crater, and they explain the processes involved in the formation of each zone. They also use the number of craters and splotches to infer the gardening rate, the rate at which the top few centimeters of regolith is churned and replaced by impacts. Their conclusion is that this is happening over 100 times faster than previously thought.
The visualization simulates the formation of one of the craters featured in the paper. We first see a flash, then zoom all the way to the surface, where the animation blinks between the actual before and after LROC NAC images (M1105837846R and M1121160416R) that were used to detect this new 12-meter crater. Finally, we see the ratio of the two images, which very clearly shows both the new crater and the radial pattern of ejecta.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
Visualizer
- Ernie Wright (USRA) [Lead]
Scientists
- Emerson J. Speyerer (Arizona State University)
- Mark Robinson (Arizona State University)
Producer
- Katrina Jackson (USRA)
Papers
This visualization is based on the following papers:- E Speyerer et al., Quantifying crater production and regolith overturn on the Moon with temporal imaging. Nature538, 215-218 (13 October 2016)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Datasets used in this visualization
LRO DEM (A.K.A. Digital Elevation Map) (Collected with the LOLA sensor)
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter LROC WAC Global Morphological Map (A.K.A. Global Morphological Map) (Collected with the Wide-Angle Camera sensor)
LRO NAC (A.K.A. Narrow Angle Camera) (Collected with the LROC sensor)
LRO WAC 643nm High Sun Global Mosaic (Collected with the LROC sensor)
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.
Related pages
March 17, 2013 Lunar Impact Forms a New Crater
March 17th, 2015
Read moreArtist's conception of the March 17, 2013 lunar impact as seen from near the impact site in Mare Imbrium.This video is also available on our YouTube channel. Artist's conception of the March 17, 2013 lunar impact as seen from Earth. Video of the March 17 impact taken by the lunar impact monitoring program at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, registered to a visualization of the Moon as it appeared at the time of the impact. The video has been slowed by a factor of 3. Before and after images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter narrow-angle camera showing the new crater formed by the March 17 impact. This pair is at the original resolution of roughly 1.3 meters per pixel. The before image is cropped from M183689789L taken February 12, 2012. The after image is from M1129645568L taken July 28, 2013. Before and after images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter narrow-angle camera showing the new crater formed by the March 17 impact, centered on the crater and magnified 4x from the original resolution of roughly 1.3 meters per pixel. The before image is cropped from M183689789L taken February 12, 2012. The after image is from M1129645568L taken July 28, 2013. An animated illustration of a few of the new crater sites found by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera team. On March 17, 2013, a NASA telescope that monitors the night side of the Moon recorded a bright flash in Mare Imbrium, at about 21°N, 24°W. The flash was one of the brightest ever recorded, and it was caused by the impact of a meteoroid estimated to be roughly a foot (30 to 40 cm) wide and just under a hundred pounds (40 kg), hitting the Moon at 60,000 miles per hour (25 km/sec).A few months after the impact, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) camera team (LROC) found the crater formed by the impact. They compared LRO images taken before and after the impact and found a new crater 18 meters (60 feet) wide, with rays of ejecta that extend several kilometers. For More InformationSee [http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/770](http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/770) Related pages