Two canyons near the south pole of the moon of the opponent with Grand Canyon, in depth and length.
Unlike the breathtaking abyss in Arizona, there are two lunar canyons, known as Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck, straight, as if the plague of the moon was cut with a knife.
And unlike the Grand Canyon, carved over millions of years by the Colorado River, Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck, they created only a few minutes after Meteor 15 miles hit the month of about 3.8 billion years.
In fact, carving these huge lunar trenches took less time to take you to bake a frozen pizza.
Impact, comparable to the impact that broke on the ground 66 million years ago and killed dinosaursHe set up up to 15 miles into the bark and dug a crater about 200 miles. In this process, Fusildades released giant rocks – what planetary scientists call ejection rays – that collapsed in the Staccato sequence to create canyons that are more than 1 deep, 5 miles and more than 165 miles long.
“They are really extraordinary on a scale,” said David Kring, a scientist in a lunar and planetary institute in Houston. “These things were carved in less than 10 minutes when the Grand Canyon lasted 5 to 6 million years.” I think it illustrates the energy of the event. ”
In the new analysis, Dr. Kring and his colleagues, Danielle Kallenborn and Gareth Collins from Imperial College London, built a mathematical model that describes how canyons were formed in the rain of giant rocks. They used photos taken by lunar exploration orbiter NASA, which showed a string of craters along the canyons to calculate the speed and direction of debris.
“Imagine a kilometer or five kilometer rock that hit the ground in more than 2,000 miles per hour,” Dr. Kring. “Each of these blocks will produce a crater with a diameter of about 20 kilometers. And they came across the ground – bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. ”
Scientists calculated that the energy needed to create two canyons was more than 130 times higher than what would be made in the explosion of all nuclear weapons that exist on Earth today.
Their findings appear in Published on Tuesday in Nature Communications magazine.
The canyons also indicate that the incoming asteroid or comet hit at an angle, although the crater itself has an almost circular shape.
The direct lines of Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck radiate out from the crater of Schrödinger’s pelvis. However, scientists have noticed that the lines, if extended, intersect in the middle of the crater.
Instead, the intersection is south. This is likely where the cosmic rock hit, the scientists said.
“I think they have an interpretation,” said Jennifer Anderson, professor Geoscience at Winona State University in Minnesota. “These ginormic crater rays show back to a point that is the center of the crater.”
This suggests that the meteor came from the south and that the curtain of the debris was largely a kopana north, far from the South Pole.
This is an encouraging finding ArtemisNASA RETURT-the-MOON program because it suggests that areas near the South Pole where the agency wants to land the astronaut the Bright to the South Pole – Aitken would be exposed to the surface.
Dr. Anderson said that the new findings coincided with the small laboratory experiments that she performed several decades ago, and fired pellets of BB size into sand that created craters less than the diameter of the foot.
“He is the most distant eject on the surface that tells you what happened in the crate event in the next times,” she said.
Less certain is how the impact has created a long, narrow stream of rocks in the ejective rays instead of a single cascade in all directions.
“We are still discussing origin,” Dr. Kring.
Eject rays could be the result of former craters or other terrain unevenness. “There could be two already existing craters that caused the focus of some of these residues into these rays,” Dr. Kring.
Dr. Anderson said that such rays also occurred in her small experiments, and also could not explain this phenomenon.
“We see that there are areas of ejection curtains that are thicker with the material, unlike the less dense,” she said. “Why it means I don’t know someone knows it, except that nature is chaotic.”
