Posted on 09/26/2019 9:46:29 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Billions of years ago, something slammed into the dark side of the moon and carved out a very, very large hole. Stretching 1,550 miles (2,500 kilometers) wide and 8 miles (13 km) deep, the South Pole-Aitken basin...
For decades, researchers have suspected that the gargantuan basin was created by a head-on collision with a very large, very fast meteor. Such an impact would have ripped the moon's crust apart and scattered chunks of lunar mantle across the crater's surface, providing a rare glimpse at what the moon is really made of.
...
Now, however... After analyzing the minerals in six plots of soil at the bottom of the South Pole-Aitken basin, a team of researchers argues that the crater's composition is all crust and no mantle, suggesting that whatever impact opened the crater billions of years ago did not hit hard enough to spray the moon's innards onto the surface.
... the team conducted reflectance tests on six patches of soil...
A crystalline rock called plagioclase was by far the most abundant mineral in each sample, accounting for 56% to 72% of the crater's composition, the researchers wrote. Formed as primordial oceans of lava cool, plagioclase is extremely common in the crusts of Earth and the moon alike, but it's less abundant in their mantles. Though the team detected other minerals in the crust that are more common in the moon's mantle, such as olivine, these rocks made up too small a fraction of the soil samples to suggest that part of the mantle had broken through the crust.
This mineral makeup complicates the theory that a giant, high-velocity meteor created the South Pole‐Aitken basin billions of years ago, as such an impact almost certainly would have scattered chunks of mantle over the lunar surface.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Lunar warming.....???
Taco Bell.
Ping
no- carpenter ants
It was Alice. Right after Ralph sent her there. Boom - zing.
What? Or whooooo?
And it’s too damn bad it wasn’t Nadler.
Decent grouping.
It was the Lambians’ annihilator beam that would have destroyed everyone, had not the Thuriens arrived in the nick of time to take the survivors to Earth.
If only Koriel had made it. (He did).
s/
“The dashed circle indicates the spot where researchers found a weird material beneath the basin that contains metal.”
What metal? Does the article kind of contradict this? or did I miss something? If they did find metal, I would be very curious what metal this is. :)
The cow kicked it as he passed.
Hmm...the Soviets were the first to photograph the dark side with Lunik III in 1959. Immediately all lunar features on that side were given Russian or communist names.
In high school I saw a lunar globe which had Latin named features on one side,and Soviet ones on the other.
Wonder if that’s still the case.
Either something big moving slowly, or something smaller...moving faster.
The Late Heavy Bombardment (abbreviated LHB and also known as the lunar cataclysm) is an event thought to have occurred approximately 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago, at a time corresponding to the Neohadean and Eoarchean eras on Earth.
Stuff hit the newly formed moon, too. In fact, the moon was formed during this time from the bombardment.
It hit from all angles, and various speeds, velocities and containing different densities.
There really is no mystery. The Earth once had such damage, but volcanic flows, plate tectonics and atmospheric weathering has wiped it clean.
We should be so lucky the God has formed such a magnificent universe for us!
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