Exploring the Moon

[Ron Schmit]

Did any of you get to see the Museum of the Moon when it came to the Bell Museum? (https://www.bellmuseum.umn.edu/blog/museum-moon/) It was just about a year ago, to celebrate the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

If you missed it, it was an inflatable model of the Moon. At seven meters in diameter, it was huge, but what amazed me was the level of detail. At an approximate scale of 1:500,000 each centimetre represents 5km of the Moon’s surface. With data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, taken at an altitude of 80 km, the 120dpi imagery of the surface was stunning, especially on the far side.

I hadn't studied the far side much. I spent more time learning to navigate the stuff that we CAN see, on "our" side. So to have the far side so detailed and rich, I couldn't take my eyes off it! So many chain craters and features I'd never seen before.

Well, here's a tool from NASA that you can use to explore the moon at that level of detail: https://trek.nasa.gov/moon/

[Dale Smith]

The NASA tool has a distance scale. I looked at a moderately small crater in one of the mare. It was almost the size of Lake Mille Lacs (≈ 16 miles x 12 miles). For comparison, the Barringer crater in Arizona is only about 4,000 feet on diameter and it is estimated that the meteor that created it impacted with a force of about 10 megatons. Now go back to the NASA tool and look at how many craters that size and larger there are in just that small field of view. It is staggering to think about the amount of energy that has pummeled the moon.

[markjob]

Thank you Ron and Dale for pointing us to the website. I think this consumed at least 2 hours of "driving" around on the Moon, it is so easy to forget the scale.

Amazing.

Mark