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Health & Fitness

The Night Sky: Late Heavy Bombardment Craters

Attached are two pictures (one with labels) of the Northeast section of the Moon. They were taken at the Mary Aloysia Hardey Observatory on 2013-05-14. This area of the Moon has a group of craters that formed from asteroid impacts three to four billion years ago during an era called the Late Heavy Bombardment.  During that period all planets in our solar system and their moons endured many large impacts from asteroids, comets and meteorites.

No one knows for certain why the Late Heavy Bombardment occurred. One interesting theory proposes that the combined gravitational tug of Jupiter and Saturn caused Neptune and Uranus to switch orbits. This gravitational glitch resulted in a multitude of comets and Kuiper belt objects getting hurled into the inner solar system. Naturally they collided with planets and their moons.

Imagine the magnitude of the explosions of asteroid impacts that are large enough to produce craters 50 miles in diameter, 100 miles in diameter and larger. It must have been a spectacular show!

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The crater Atlas is near the center of the picture. It is 50 miles wide and nearly 2 miles deep. That means the Atlas crater is half the size of Connecticut and there are many craters on the Moon that are much larger!

On a much smaller scale, NASA recorded a small meteor impact on the Moon on March 17, 2013. The meteorite weighed about 80 pounds and produced a crater 60 feet across. Although small, it was the largest NASA recorded lunar impact since it began monitoring the Moon for impact events eight years ago. The Moon has no atmosphere, so small meteorites impact the Moon’s surface. Such a small meteorite would burn up high in the Earth’s atmosphere.

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Since the Moon has no weathering to erase impacts, the craters on the Moon record the history of collisions in our solar system. After billions of years the Moon still has much to teach us.

Starry Nights!
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