The Moon At Fault
September 2nd 2010 00:45
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NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft
has made some interesting discoveries about the Moon. Our Moon seems to be getting smaller.
The Apollo 17 mission,astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt were the first to discover what appeared to be fault in the lunar crust.
There tried to drive the lunar rover up a 200-foot-high rise known as the
Lincoln-Lee is the kind of geological feature created when one slab of rock overrides another due to horizontal compression (what geologists term a thrust fault).On Earth examples of thrust faults occur where crustal plates collide. The Andes rim on west coast of South America is an example.
Very little was known about the lunar geology back in 1972.
The discovery of the Lincoln-Lee is not an isolated incidence but one of perhaps hundreds of small thrust faults all over the Moon’s surface.
Previous Apollo missions had photographer several scarps.Several scraps were photographed by cameras mounted on the orbiting
command modules of Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17 however these missions were mostly confined to the Moon’s lunar equator.
Team leader Thomas Watters concluded that "We have now found that
these lobate scarps occur everywhere on the Moon," Watters
explains, "which means the Moon has been contracting or
shrinking globally."
Its apparent that our Moon is slowly drifting away from Earth and getting smaller in more ways than one.
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