Lunar Polar Wander
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- Visualizations by:
- Ernie Wright
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- Written by:
- Lonnie Shekhtman
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- Scientific consulting by:
- Vishnu Viswanathan
- View full credits
The wandering path of the lunar South Pole is shown over a period from 4.25 billion years ago to the present.
This video can also be viewed on the SVS YouTube channel.
The North and South Poles of the Moon haven't always been where they are today. Asteroid impacts both large and small, most of which occurred early in the Moon's history, have changed the Moon's mass distribution. After each impact, the Moon gradually rebalanced itself around its spin axis. This kind of rebalancing, in which a planet or moon reorients itself while the spin axis continues to point in the same direction in space, is called
In a study published in the Planetary Science Journal, David E. Smith, Vishnu Viswanathan, and their coauthors used maps of the Moon's topography and gravity, based on data gathered by NASA's LRO and GRAIL missions, to infer the evolution of the Moon's mass distribution and its effect on the location of the poles. They found that impacts have moved the poles almost 10 degrees in latitude – 300 kilometers or 190 miles – over the roughly 4.25 billion years since the cataclysmic event that created the South Pole-Aitken basin.
The visualization on this page shows the polar wander calculated by the computer simulation created for the study. As seen here, the South Pole arrives in roughly its present position relatively early in the Moon's history, raising the possibility that some of the water ice and other volatiles trapped in permanently shadowed regions near the South Pole may be up to 3.8 billion years old.
true polar wander.
In a study published in the Planetary Science Journal, David E. Smith, Vishnu Viswanathan, and their coauthors used maps of the Moon's topography and gravity, based on data gathered by NASA's LRO and GRAIL missions, to infer the evolution of the Moon's mass distribution and its effect on the location of the poles. They found that impacts have moved the poles almost 10 degrees in latitude – 300 kilometers or 190 miles – over the roughly 4.25 billion years since the cataclysmic event that created the South Pole-Aitken basin.
The visualization on this page shows the polar wander calculated by the computer simulation created for the study. As seen here, the South Pole arrives in roughly its present position relatively early in the Moon's history, raising the possibility that some of the water ice and other volatiles trapped in permanently shadowed regions near the South Pole may be up to 3.8 billion years old.
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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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Writer
- Lonnie Shekhtman (ADNET) [Lead]
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Scientist
- Vishnu Viswanathan (University of Maryland Baltimore County) [Lead]
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Producer
- David Ladd (AIMM)
Papers
This visualization is based on the following papers:- The Contribution of Small Impact Craters to Lunar Polar Wander, David E. Smith et al 2022 Planet. Sci. J. 3 217
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)
DE421 (A.K.A. JPL DE421)
Ephemeris
NASA/JPL
Planetary ephemerides
Dataset can be found at: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?ephemerides#planets
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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