Retracing the origins of a massive, multi-ring crater
An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have reconstructed the extreme collision that created one of the moon’s largest craters, 3.8 billion years ago. Jeffrey Taylor, a professor in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, was among the scientists who retraced the moon’s dramatic response in the first hours following the massive impact, and identified the processes by which large, multi-ring basins can form in the aftermath of such events.
The findings, published in two papers in the journal Science, may shed light on how giant impacts shaped the evolution of the moon, and even life on Earth, shortly after the planets formed.
- Formation of the Orientale lunar multiring basin, Science, October 28, 2016
- Gravity field of the Orientale basin from the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory Mission, Science, October 28, 2016
The team’s results pertain to the moon’s Orientale basin, an expansive, bull’s eye-shaped depression on the southwestern edge of the moon, just barely visible from Earth. The basin is surrounded by three concentric rings of rock, the largest one stretching 580 miles across—about six times as wide as the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. Until now, it’s been unclear how massive impacts produced the complex structures displayed by multi-ring basins.
Probes on NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft took measurements of the basin’s gravity field at high spatial resolution, providing scientists with a precise map of the moon’s interior mass distribution which enabled the researchers to make revealing geophysical observations and develop a computer model to re-create the impact and its effects.
Taylor’s role in the mission focused on integrating information about the composition of the crust in and around the Orientale Basin into the interpretation of the gravity data.
“In short, using orbital remote sensing data, I helped put these amazing geophysical observations and computer modeling into a mineralogical and geochemical context,” said Taylor.