Title of Article: The Moon’s Wrinkles
Author : Blaise Sevier
Source (indicate newspaper, magazine, or web) Web
Date Article Written: May 15th
“Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting out ideas. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.” –Samuel Ullman
Etched into the face of the moon are battle wounds that showcase what the moon has gone through in the last 4.5 million years. A smiling face is what we see every night as we look out our window. Sadly there is not a man on the moon smiling down on us. The moon is made out of is craters, dark plans and rock. These all left behind from volcanic eruptions and collisions from objects in space. Each of the scars tells us a story of how the moon is now what it is today.
A team from California Institute of Technology displays their findings of the moons roughness, its hills and smoothness. The way that they collected this information is from LOLA (the Lunar Orbiter Laser Alimeter). The team leader Meg Rosenburg has figured out that the roughness of the features on the moon gives us an estimated age of the moon. Scientists have figured this out by looking at the bumpiness of the moon in long and short scales. They have constantly measured the slope of the moon to create a finished map of the moon which shows us the range of the different scales of the moon. The team has concluded that the older craters are the ones that are more uneven and the craters that are smoother are younger. "It is remarkable that the moon exhibits a great range of topographic character: on the extremes, surfaces roughened by the accumulation of craters over billions of years can be near regions smoothed and resurfaced by more recent mare volcanism," mentions Oded Aharonson, Meg Rosenburg's consultant at CIT.
With this information scientists can detect extremely important clues about how the moon was created. Already scientists have concluded that a basin on the moon called the Orientale Basin exposes precious remains of materials from a colossal object that slammed into the moon many years ago. The information also helps scientists figure out the high and low point of the moon. "By looking at both together, we can say that one part of Orientale is not just higher or lower, it's also differently rough," Rosenburg says. "That gives us some clues about the impact process that launched the debris and also about the surface processes that later acted to modify it."
As we gradually learn more and more about the moon we will answer many of the unknown questions we have regarding our solar system. In time we will start to learn about the Marias and creators of the moon this will give us knowledge on how the earth started. Maybe in a couple of years we will not be studying the moon but maybe Mars or Jupiter. As the years go on more and more answers will be found leading us in to a world of more questions.
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