Thin Crust...

The GRAIL mission so far has found little evidence for some hypothetical ancient impact basins.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT

A sneak peek at the first results from a NASA mission to measure the Moon’s gravitational field hints at a lunar crust that is only half as thick as once thought.


There were a few gasps among scientists in the audience at a 13 September seminar at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they took in the data revealed by Maria Zuber, principal investigator for NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. Zuber, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, showed a crisp, high-resolution gravitational map made with data collected by GRAIL’s twin spacecraft between March and June of this year.

 

Nature: Tandem satellites probe the Moon's interior

E-mail me when people leave their comments –

You need to be a member of Blacksciencefictionsociety to add comments!

Join Blacksciencefictionsociety