doctorsforum: The surface of the Moon can be unreal

About a quarter of the craters of the moon can be filled with fragments of asteroids colliding with the Moon at low speed and not fragments of lunar soil and rock, as previously thought, say planetary scientists in a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The surface of the Moon can be unreal

One characteristic of the Moon are considered huge craters dotting its visible and dark side. They were formed as a result of falling asteroids on its surface during its existence. Some lowland on the moon, for example, the largest lunar Sea, Ocean Storm, are the marks of the fall of celestial bodies. Until now it was believed that the surface of these craters contains rocks asteroids as they evaporate in a collision with the matter of the moon, according to RIA Novosti.

But Jay Melosh of Purdue University in West Lafayette (USA) and his colleagues have questioned this assumption by creating a number of computer models simulating the fall of asteroids on the moon. In these models, the astronomers examined what happens to large and small asteroids colliding with the Moon at a relatively high or low speed.

It turned out that the remains of asteroids do not evaporate and remain at the bottom of the crater, with a large angle of incidence, the mass of a celestial body and low speed of its movement before the collision. According to researchers, nearly all the asteroids, whose speed does not exceed the modest simulations in astronomical terms 12 kilometers per second, had to leave their "footprint" on the lunar surface.

Meloche and his colleagues tried to estimate the number of such "footprints" on the moon, by calculating the rate of fall of the asteroid that fell to Earth satellite in the past, the depth and size of craters. Their number was unexpectedly large - about a quarter of the existing lunar craters may contain chips and fragments of asteroids. According to scientists, this fact explains the presence of geologically "impossibility" of rocks on the Moon, whose traces were found probe "Chandrayaan" and "Kaguyya."