Impacts

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

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IMPACTS AND CRATERING

o Not well understood until past 50 years
o Orbits intersect at same moment
o Orbital motion is very fast, so gravity does not play a strong role in impacts
o Gravity can sometimes warp an orbit, changing the collision course
o Impacts happen on any solid, rigid object
o Can happen on gaseous objects, but effects will dissipate
o Some craters have been filled in or eroded, but there is still evidence for them
o Energy from momentum ---> heat ---> explosion ---> shock waves ---> vaporization of crust and
impactor ---> materials fall back to surface ---> smaller craters ---> main crater with ridge
o Crater = Greek for "cup"
o Some are filled in with molten then cooled ---> flat floor
o Some have hollow centers
THE MOON'S APPEARANCE
o Maria: relatively smooth and dark parts of the moon(Latin root for "sea")
o Gravity is so weak that any atmosphere and water would have escaped into space
o Moon used to rotate faster, but tides in the solid moon raised by the Earth's gravity caused a gradual
loss of rotation energy
o Synchronous Rotation: the Earth's gravity locked the moon in this rotation, pulling on a bulge in the
distribution of lunar mass to prevent the moon from rotating freely
o When a moon is crescent or quarter, the sunlit part is covered with long shadows
o Terminator: the line that separates day and night; this is where shadows are longest
THE LUNAR SURFACE
o Rocks on the moon were familiar to terrestrial geologists; most are igneous rock, like basalt
o Some elements that are rare on Earth are abundant (uranium and thorium)
o Craters came from various impacts
o Counting the number of craters in a given area can reveal when it was last molten
o More craters = older section
o Lighter sections are older, darker sections are younger and have cooled more recently
o Dark areas have varying dates
o The Late Heavy Bombardment was 3.8 billion years ago; if it solidified before, it has lost of craters, if it
solidified after, it has few
o Found absolute age by studying rocks; compared the current ratio of radioactive atoms to
nonradioactive atoms present
o Oldest rock was 4.4 billion years old; youngest rock was 3.1 billion years old
o 3.8 billion years ago, the interior heated from radioactive elements and volcanism began
o Lava filled larger basins, forming maria
o Tycho Crater has a raised rim and central peaks
o Central Peaks: parts that never melted; can be a single mountain or cluster
o Samples of peaks show that they were heavily shocked and shattered
o 1990s: Clementine and Lunar Prospector spacecrafts took photos and measurements
o Near and far hemispheres are very different; maria are almost absent from the far side
o Difference probably results from the different thicknesses of the lunar crust
o Layers of the mood under the surface are highly fractured
o Upper part of crust is porous and pulverized
o Crust is thinner than first thought