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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

A Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists discovered two geologically young craters—one 16 million, the other between 75 and 420 million, years old—in the Moon's darkest regions [phys.org].

"These 'young' impact craters are a really exciting discovery," said SwRI Senior Research Scientist Dr. Kathleen Mandt, who outlined the findings in a paper published by the journal Icarus. "Finding geologically young craters and honing in on their age helps us understand the collision history in the solar system."

Key to this discovery was the SwRI-developed Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) instrument aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). LAMP uses the far-ultraviolet Lyman-alpha band skyglow and light from ultraviolet-bright stars LAMP to "see" in the dark and image the permanently shaded regions of the Moon. Using LAMP and LRO's Mini-RF radar data, the team mapped the floors of very large, deep craters near the lunar south pole. These deep craters are difficult to study because sunlight never illuminates them directly. Tiny differences in reflectivity, or albedo, measured by LAMP allowed scientists to discover these two craters and estimate their ages.

Not sure how Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) helps planetary scientists understand collision history in the solar system, but hat's off to them for doing so.

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