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Craters Are Appearing On The Moon Faster Than Scientists Thought

Photo from Pixabay

There are new craters that form on the moon’s surface much more often than scientists initially thought, according to a new study. The findings now present some dangers to any future moon missions, which may face increased risks of encountering falling objects.

The moon is pockmarked with hundreds of craters, some of which are billions of years old. The moon has no atmosphere, so any falling bodies don’t burn up before reaching the surface as they do on Earth. This leaves the lunar surface vulnerable to a steady stream of impacts that whip up the top layer, called regolith, Space.com reports.

There have been many studies of how craters form on the moon and the past rate of crater formations, which have been invaluable in assessing features on the moon’s surface. But there has been little information on present-day cratering, which would prove useful regarding moon missions.

A group of scientists decided to delve deeper into modern lunar crater formation and examined over 14,000 before-and-after images of the lunar surface. The images were taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), covering around 960,000 square miles or 6.6% of the moon’s surface. The scientists found that some spots where there were no previous craters now had impact marks, with a time gap of 176 to 1,241 calendar days.

Emerson Speyerer, the study lead author and a planetary scientist at the Arizona State University at Tempe, explains, “When looking at just a single image, many of the newly formed features are indistinguishable from their surroundings.” He says,

It’s only with these detailed comparisons with previous images that we can separate out these small surface changes.

In total, the scientists found 222 new craters on the moon in the new lunar images, 33% more than was predicted by current models. The craters ranged in size from at least 32 feet in diameter to 140 feet wide. Also, there were broad marks around the craters that the scientists believe were created by debris following impact. They estimate that this process is churning the top 0.8 inches of regolith across the whole surface of the moon over a hundred times faster than previously forecast.

“I’m excited by the fact that we can see the regolith evolve and churn — a process that was believed to take hundreds of thousands to millions of years to occur — in images acquired over the past several years,” Speyerer says. The discoveries also suggest that some young lunar features, like volcanic deposits, may be even younger, he adds.

The odds of any spacecraft on the moon getting hit by cosmic bodies are small, Speyerer says, but these findings shed a great deal of insight on what lunar missions might be facing, and help in planning and prevention.

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