Aristarchus Crater
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Aristarchus Crater
Aristarchus is a lunar impact crater that lies in the northwest part of the Moon's near side. It is considered the brightest of the large formations on the lunar surface, with an albedo nearly double that of most lunar features. The feature is bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, and displays unusually bright features when viewed through a large telescope. It is also readily identified when most of the lunar surface is illuminated by earthshine. The crater is deeper than the Grand Canyon. The crater is named after the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos. It is located at the southeastern edge of the Aristarchus plateau, an elevated area that contains a number of volcanic features, such as sinuous rilles. This area is also noted for the large number of reported transient lunar phenomena, as well as recent emissions of radon gas as measured by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft. Selenography Aristarchus is located on the Aristarchus plateau, an elevated rocky rise ...
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Lunar Orbiter 4
Lunar Orbiter 4 was a robotic U.S. spacecraft, part of the Lunar Orbiter program, Lunar Orbiter Program, designed to orbit the Moon, after the three previous orbiters had completed the required needs for Project Apollo, Apollo mapping and site selection. It was given a more general objective, to "perform a broad systematic photographic survey of lunar surface features in order to increase the scientific knowledge of their nature, origin, and processes, and to serve as a basis for selecting sites for more detailed scientific study by subsequent orbital and landing missions". It was also equipped to collect selenodetic, radiation intensity, and micrometeoroid impact data. Mission Summary The spacecraft was placed in a Free-return trajectory, cislunar trajectory and injected into an elliptical near polar high lunar orbit for data acquisition. The orbit was with an inclination of 85.5 degrees and a period of 12 hours. After initial photography on May 11, 1967 problems started occu ...
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Location Of Lunar Aristarchus Crater
In geography, location or place are used to denote a region (point, line, or area) on Earth's surface or elsewhere. The term ''location'' generally implies a higher degree of certainty than ''place'', the latter often indicating an entity with an ambiguous boundary, relying more on human or social attributes of place identity and sense of place than on geometry. Types Locality A locality, settlement, or populated place is likely to have a well-defined name but a boundary that is not well defined varies by context. London, for instance, has a legal boundary, but this is unlikely to completely match with general usage. An area within a town, such as Covent Garden in London, also almost always has some ambiguity as to its extent. In geography, location is considered to be more precise than "place". Relative location A relative location, or situation, is described as a displacement from another site. An example is "3 miles northwest of Seattle". Absolute location An absolute locatio ...
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Donald Wilhelms
Don Edward Wilhelms (born July 5, 1930) is a former United States Geological Survey geologist who contributed to geologic mapping of the Earth's moon and to the geologic training of the Apollo astronauts. He is the author of '' To a Rocky Moon: A Geologist's History of Lunar Exploration'' (1993), ''The geologic history of the Moon'' (1987), and he co-authored the ''Geologic Map of the Near Side of the Moon'' (1971) with John F. McCauley. Wilhelms also contributed to ''Apollo Over the Moon: A View from Orbit'' (NASA SP-362). He has also contributed to the study of Mars (including Mariner 9), Mercury, and Ganymede. Biography He was born July 5, 1930. Wilhelms was the recipient of the G. K. Gilbert Award in 1988. He received the Shoemaker Distinguished Lunar Scientist Award in 2010 at the Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 19 ...
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Copernican Period
The Copernican Period in the lunar geologic timescale runs from approximately 1.1 billion years ago to the present day. The base of the Copernican period is defined by impact craters that possess bright optically immature ray systems. The crater Copernicus is a prominent example of rayed crater, but it does not mark the base of the Copernican period. Copernican age deposits are mostly represented by crater ejecta, but a small area of mare basalt has covered part of (and is thus younger than) some of the rays of the Copernican crater Lichtenberg, and therefore the basalt is mapped as Copernican age. Definition The base of the Copernican period is defined based on the recognition that freshly excavated materials on the lunar surface are generally "bright" and that they become darker over time as a result of space weathering processes. Operationally, this period was originally defined as the time at which impact craters "lost" their bright ray systems. This definition, howev ...
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Tycho (lunar Crater)
Tycho () is a prominent Lunar craters, lunar impact crater located in the southern lunar highlands, named after the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601)., accessed 19 February 2019 It is estimated to be 108 million years old. To the south of Tycho is the crater Street (crater), Street, to the east is Pictet (crater), Pictet, and to the north-northeast is Sasserides (crater), Sasserides. The surface around Tycho is replete with craters of various sizes, many overlapping still older craters. Some of the smaller craters are secondary craters formed from larger chunks of ejecta from Tycho. It is one of the Moon, Moon's brightest craters, with a diameter of and a depth of . Age and description Tycho is a relatively young crater, with an estimated age of 108 million years (Annum, Ma), based on analysis of samples of the crater ray recovered during the Apollo 17 mission. This age initially suggested that the impactor may have been a member of the Baptistina family of asteroids ...
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Copernicus (lunar Crater)
Copernicus is a lunar impact crater located in eastern Oceanus Procellarum. It was named after the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. It typifies craters that formed during the Copernican period in that it has a prominent ray system. It may have been created by debris from the breakup of the parent body of asteroid 495 Eulalia 800 million years ago. Characteristics Copernicus is visible using binoculars, and is located slightly northwest of the center of the Moon's Earth-facing hemisphere. South of the crater is the Mare Insularum, and to the south-south west is the crater Reinhold. North of Copernicus are the Montes Carpatus, which lie at the south edge of Mare Imbrium. West of Copernicus is a group of dispersed lunar hills. Due to its relative youth, the crater has remained in a relatively pristine shape since it formed. The circular rim has a discernible hexagonal form, with a terraced inner wall and a 30 km wide, sloping rampart that descends nearly a kilometer to the s ...
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Space Weathering
Space weathering is the type of weathering that occurs to any object exposed to the harsh environment of outer space. Bodies without atmospheres (including the Moon, Mercury, the asteroids, comets, and most of the moons of other planets) take on many weathering processes: * collisions of galactic cosmic rays and solar cosmic rays, * irradiation, implantation, and sputtering from solar wind particles, and * bombardment by different sizes of meteorites and micrometeorites. Space weathering is important because these processes affect the physical and optical properties of the surface of many planetary bodies. Therefore, it is critical to understand the effects of space weathering in order to properly interpret remotely sensed data. History Much of our knowledge of the space weathering process comes from studies of the lunar samples returned by the Apollo program, particularly the lunar soils (or regolith). The constant flux of high energy particles and micrometeorites, along ...
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Solar Wind
The solar wind is a stream of charged particles released from the upper atmosphere of the Sun, called the corona. This plasma mostly consists of electrons, protons and alpha particles with kinetic energy between . The composition of the solar wind plasma also includes a mixture of materials found in the solar plasma: trace amounts of heavy ions and atomic nuclei such as C, N, O, Ne, Mg, Si, S, and Fe. There are also rarer traces of some other nuclei and isotopes such as P, Ti, Cr, 54Fe and 56Fe, and 58Ni, 60Ni, and 62Ni. Superposed with the solar-wind plasma is the interplanetary magnetic field. The solar wind varies in density, temperature and speed over time and over solar latitude and longitude. Its particles can escape the Sun's gravity because of their high energy resulting from the high temperature of the corona, which in turn is a result of the coronal magnetic field. The boundary separating the corona from the solar wind is called the Alfvén surface. At a distance of ...
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European Geosciences Union
The European Geosciences Union (EGU) is a non-profit international union in the fields of Earth, planetary, and space sciences whose vision is to "realise a sustainable and just future for humanity and for the planet." The organisation has headquarters in Munich (Germany). Membership is open to individuals who are professionally engaged in or associated with these fields and related studies, including students and retired seniors. The EGU publishes 18 open-access scientific journals and a number of other science publications. It also organises a number of topical meetings, as well as education and outreach activities. Its most prominent event is the EGU General Assembly, an annual conference that brings together over 15,000 scientists from all over the world. The meeting's sessions cover a wide range of topics, including volcanology, planetary exploration, the Earth's internal structure and atmosphere, climate change, and renewable energies. The EGU has 22 scientific divisions ...
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Rimae Aristarchus
The ''Rimea Aristarchus'' is a system of narrow sinuous rille Rille (German for 'groove') is typically used to describe any of the long, narrow depressions in the surface of the Moon that resemble channels. The Latin term is ''rima'', plural ''rimae''. Typically, a rille can be several kilometers wid ...s to the north of the Aristarchus crater. They extend for a distance of 121 km, making them amongst the largest rilles on the moon. References Geological features on the Moon {{Moon-crater-stub ...
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Rille
Rille (German for 'groove') is typically used to describe any of the long, narrow depressions in the surface of the Moon that resemble channels. The Latin term is ''rima'', plural ''rimae''. Typically, a rille can be several kilometers wide and hundreds of kilometers in length. However, the term has also been used loosely to describe similar structures on a number of planets in the Solar System, including Mars, Venus, and on a number of moons. All bear a structural resemblance to each other. Structures Three types of rille are found on the lunar surface: * Sinuous rilles meander in a curved path like a mature river, and are commonly thought to be the remains of collapsed lava tubes or extinct lava flows. They usually begin at an extinct volcano, then meander and sometimes split as they are followed across the surface. , 195 sinuous rilles have been identified on the Moon. Vallis Schröteri in Oceanus Procellarum is the largest sinuous rille, and Rima Hadley is the only one ...
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Vallis Schröteri
Schroter's Valley, frequently known by the Latinized name Vallis Schröteri, is a sinuous valley or rille on the surface of the near side of the Moon. It is located on a rise of continental ground, sometimes called the Aristarchus plateau, that is surrounded by the Oceanus Procellarum to the south and west and the Mare Imbrium to the northwest. At the southern edge of this rise are the craters Aristarchus and Herodotus. This is the largest sinuous rille on the Moon. It begins at a 6 km diameter crater located 25 km to the north of Herodotus. (The start of the rille has been termed the "Cobra's Head" by some observers, due to its resemblance to a snake.) From the crater it follows a meandering path, first to the north, then setting a course toward the northwest, before finally bending back to the south until it reaches a 1 km high precipice at the edge of the Oceanus Procellarum. The rille has a maximum width of about 10 km, then gradually narrows to less tha ...
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