Moon Sheds Light on Earth's Impact History
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- Visualizations by:
- Ernie Wright
- View full credits
Scientists have found a new way to estimate the ages of relatively large, young craters on the Moon using data from the Diviner instrument on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The method has identified over 100 craters younger than one billion years and larger than 10 kilometers across. The ages suggest that the cratering rate has more than doubled over the last 290 million years or so.
The Earth's crater record shows the same pattern. It was thought that some of the older craters were erased by weathering and geological processes, but the new Moon data suggest that the Earth record is a true reflection of the cratering rate — that the Earth has been hit more often in the recent past than it was a few hundred million years ago.
The Earth's crater record shows the same pattern. It was thought that some of the older craters were erased by weathering and geological processes, but the new Moon data suggest that the Earth record is a true reflection of the cratering rate — that the Earth has been hit more often in the recent past than it was a few hundred million years ago.
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Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
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Visualizer
- Ernie Wright (USRA) [Lead]
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Scientist
- Sara Mazrouei (University of Toronto)
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Producer
- David Ladd (AIMM)
Papers
This visualization is based on the following papers:Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Datasets used in this visualization
LRO (Collected with the Diviner sensor)
LRO DEM (A.K.A. Digital Elevation Map) (Collected with the LOLA sensor)
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter LROC WAC Color Mosaic (A.K.A. Natural Color Hapke Normalized WAC Mosaic) (Collected with the LRO Camera sensor)
Mosaic
Arizona State University
This natural-color global mosaic is based on the 'Hapke normalized' mosaic from LRO's wide-angle camera. The data has been gamma corrected, white balanced, and range adjusted to more closely match human vision.
See more visualizations using this data setNote: 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.
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