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Crater Chains on the Lunar South Pole
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Crater Chains on the Lunar South Pole Dana Felberg Steven Hester David Nielsen Zach Weddle Jack Williams Sunday, March 27, 2011
Transcript of Crater Chains on the Lunar South Pole
Crater Chains on the Lunar South Pole
Dana FelbergSteven HesterDavid NielsenZach Weddle
Jack Williams
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Research Goal
To identify crater chains in lunar South Polar region.
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Action Plan!
1. Analyze the mosaic photograph from the LROC WAC (Wide Angle Camera) and identify any and
all possible crater chains in the Lunar South Pole region depicted in the photograph.
2. Carefully examine the identified possible crater chains and weed out any sites that fail to
actually qualify as crater chains.
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LROC WAC South Pole
Mosaic Image
We looked at a very detailed and up close version of this image in order to identify our crater chains.
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Top Right
We broke the picture up into four quadrants and analyzed them individually
Top Left
Bottom Left Bottom Right
1.
4.3.
2.
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1st Quadrant- Top Left
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2nd Quadrant- Top Right
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3rd Quadrant- Bottom LeftSunday, March 27, 2011
4th Quadrant- Bottom RightSunday, March 27, 2011
Complete Image
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Crater Chain Criteria1. Proximity: the individual craters in crater chains are close
together. If there was a group of very spread out craters we determined that they were not part of a crater chain.
2. Age: age was a major factor in crater chain determination. Craters in a crater chain would have all been made at the same time, so we looked carefully for any discrepancies between the features of the different craters in a possible chain. We specifically determined relative age based on the amount of regolith covering the craters, any other craters that had been superimposed on the craters in the chains, and the level of visible decay of the craters.
3. Size: crater chains are generally smaller in size, so we ruled out most of the very large chains of craters, reasoning that they were not actually crater chains.
Arrangement: crater chains are for the most part linear or near linear in shape/design. Any irregular arrangements of the craters were not crater chains.
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Sources Davy Crater Chain: Implications for Tidal Disruptions in the Earth-
Moon System by R.W. Wichman and C.A. Wood.
Can Tidal Disruption of Asteroids Make Crater Chains on the Earth and Moon? by William Bottke, Derek Richardson and Stanley Love.
Gravitational Aggregates: Evidence and Evolution by D. C. Richardson, Z. M. Leinhardt, H. J. Melosh, W. F. Bottke Jr., and E. Asphaug.
Crater Chains on Callisto and Ganymede by P. Schenk.
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