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In addition to mountains, valleys, and impact craters, the following surface features have received names in the Lunar nomenclature, many of them named after a nearby crater or mountain. The listed diameter for these features is the longest dimension that contains the entire geological formation.
The Moon is the only extraterrestrial body for which we have samples with a known geologic context. A handful of lunar meteorites have been recognized on Earth, though their source craters on the Moon are unknown. A substantial portion of the lunar surface has not been explored, and a number of geological questions remain unanswered.
Buzz Aldrin's bootprint on lunar soil Regolith collected during Apollo 17 mission. Lunar regolith is the unconsolidated material found on the surface of the Moon and in the Moon's tenuous atmosphere. Sometimes referred to as Lunar soil, Lunar soil specifically refers to the component of regolith smaller than 1 cm.
Regolith covers almost the entire lunar surface, bedrock protruding only on very steep-sided crater walls and the occasional lava channel. This regolith has formed over the last 4.6 billion years from the impact of large and small meteoroids , from the steady bombardment of micrometeoroids and from solar and galactic charged particles breaking ...
The modern system of lunar nomenclature was introduced in 1651 by Giovanni Battista Riccioli. [1] Riccioli's map of the Moon was drawn by Francesco Maria Grimaldi, who has a crater named after him. A related set of features are the Lunar lacus / ˈ l eɪ k ə s / (singular also lacus, Latin for "lake"), [a] which are smaller basaltic plains of ...
The ages of the mare basalts have been determined both by direct radiometric dating and by the technique of crater counting.The radiometric ages range from about 3.16 to 4.2 billion years old (Ga), [4] whereas the youngest ages determined from crater counting are about 1.2 Ga. [5] Updated measurements of samples collected by the Chang’e-5 mission show that some lunar basalts could be as ...
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Wide Angle Camera image of Reiner Gamma Another view of Reiner Gamma swirls Mare Ingenii Swirls east of Firsov crater, from Apollo 10. Lunar swirls are enigmatic features found across the Moon's surface, which are characterized by having a high albedo, appearing optically immature (i.e. having the optical characteristics of a relatively young regolith), and (often ...
Moon rocks on Earth come from four sources: those collected by six United States Apollo program crewed lunar landings from 1969 to 1972; those collected by three Soviet uncrewed Luna probes in the 1970s; those collected by the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program's uncrewed probes; and rocks that were ejected naturally from the lunar surface before falling to Earth as lunar meteorites.