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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: 5, Informative) by isostatic on Friday March 20 2015, @02:16PM

    by isostatic (365) on Friday March 20 2015, @02:16PM (#160400) Journal

    Largest crater is about 290km across, but you might be thinking of the seas that are visible.

    20/20 vision gives you 1 minute of arc resolution, that's about 100km on the moon, so you should just about be able to pick out the largest craters, but they'd be very small, same size seeing a small mobile phone at the other end of a football stadium.

    The Luna mares are 1,100 km, so 4 times the size, and somewhere in the region of seeing a large dinner plate at the other end of a football stadium.

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  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday March 20 2015, @03:52PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 20 2015, @03:52PM (#160442) Journal

    Thank you. That's helpful.

    I just assumed the seas were craters.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2015, @11:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2015, @11:09PM (#160609)

      you can see heaps of craters with a fairly cheap refractive telescope. if you have decent vision you might even be able to see a few with a pair of binoculars

      reflective telescopes are the shit though. if you have one of those, i'm jealous... even moreso if you live away from cities where light pollution allows you to see more stuff