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Discovery of a Massive, 198 Kilometer-Wide Crater on the Moon

posted by janrinok on Friday March 20 2015, @01:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-was-there,-hiding,-all-the-time dept.

kaszz writes:

The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference announced on 2015-03-16 that a 198 km wide crater has been found on the moon using the GRAIL spacecraft that uses gravitational field mapping. This enabled the discovery of craters below the surface. It's been named the Earhart crater. Nice gravitational photos can be found in the links.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday March 20 2015, @02:12PM

    by Nuke (3162) on Friday March 20 2015, @02:12PM (#160398)

    The missing aviator? Why is it named after her - is it her crash site?

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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2015, @02:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2015, @02:42PM (#160408)

    Earth females were complaining that all the other craters were named after earth men. Meanwhile, extra-terrestrials are organizing protests and riots on Earth because we named everything after Earthlings.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by isostatic on Friday March 20 2015, @03:09PM

    by isostatic (365) on Friday March 20 2015, @03:09PM (#160422) Journal

    She was a pioneer. Charles Lindbergh has a crater too, as well as people that had nothing to do with that field, Charles Babbage for example, or Charles Darwin -- that's 120km large!

    Near-side craters were obviously named after people in past centuries a long time ago, when the first telescopes were being made. Far side craters, as far as mankind was concerned, didn't exist until 1959. Fortunately new surface craters of any appreciable size are not found on the moon any more (insignificant ones measured in a few dozen metres are findable, but they don't really get named)

    Ironically Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins got craters named after them, but they're all very small (2.4 - 4.6km in diameter).