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Understanding the Moon: Features, Origins, and Water Discoveries

Explore the captivating features of the Moon, including its craters, highlands, lowlands (maria), and unique geological properties. This overview covers significant missions like LCROSS and Lunar Prospector, which identified water ice in lunar craters and expanded our understanding of the Moon's composition. Discover various theories on the Moon’s origins, including the Giant Impact Hypothesis, Fission, and Sisterhood, and learn how the Moon's relationship with Earth reveals crucial data about our planetary system.

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Understanding the Moon: Features, Origins, and Water Discoveries

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Presentation Transcript

  1. The Moon

  2. What We See

  3. Where We’ve Been

  4. The Big Features Oceanus (ocean) Maria (Mare) (sea) Craters Highlands – bright, cratered regions Lowlands/Maria – dark, flat regions

  5. Other Features Mountains Valleys

  6. Librations • The result of • wobbling of the Moon’s axis toward/away from earth • Relative motion of the observer as Earth rotates • Non-circularity of moon’s orbit (change in size)

  7. What’s it made of? I…am…IRON MOON Ti abundance (blue = lots, orange/purple = less) But…no dipolar magnetic field. The moon’s weak B field comes from magnetic minerals.

  8. The Real Dark Side of the Moon • Note which side the maria are on. • Why only that side? • Anorthosite: igneous rock rich in Ti, Fe • Basalt: fine-grained igneous rock caused by cooling magma

  9. Mascons

  10. Water? 1996: Clementine indicates ice in deep craters 1998: Lunar Prospector indicates ice 1998: LP crashed into surface; no water seen 2009: Moon Mineral Mapper aboard Chandrayaan-1 detects water Lunar Prospector measures neutrons from H Chandrayaan-1 (water in blue)

  11. LCROSS • Launched with LRO in 2008 • Atlas-Centaur rocket impactor targeted Cabeus crater • Impactor (2305 kg/10,000mph) produced ejecta plume • LCROSS probe flew through the plume and crashed, relaying data • Data indicate 5% of plume mass was water

  12. Where did the moon come from? • 4 theories • Fission (moon broke off from earth) • Sisterhood/Co-accretion (formed at the same time) • Capture (moon formed somewhere else but drifted by and ended up in the Earth’s gravitational field) • Giant Impactor (something hit the earth and the resulting material formed the moon)

  13. Which one is right? • Fission • Composition of E and M are similar, but not that similar. • Not enough mass in the Pacific Basin to account for the moon. 2. Sisterhood/Co-accretion • See #1 about composition. • E and M should be the same age; M is younger.

  14. Which one is right? 3. Capture • E and M are too similar for the moon to have formed elsewhere • Angular momentum of the E/M system isn’t right for the moon having flown in and stopped • 4. Giant Impactor • Given a Mars-sized impactor, mass is right • Volatile metals and lack of water on the moon indicate high temperatures in the past. • Simulations show it’s viable (angular momentum OK) • Lower density of moon, lack of iron are consistent with violent impact

  15. Whack-a-Moon t=0 • Eventually, the cloud becomes a disk and then a moon. • The impactor core becomes the moon’s core • Intense heat is consistent with lack of volatiles and lack of similarity to the earth. t=24h

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