280 new craters on the moon that have never been mapped before have been identified by searchers at Curtin University in Western Australia using a combination of gravity and terrain modelling. 66 of the craters were described as “distinctly visible” from a gravity and topographic view.
Professor Will Featherstone of Curtin’s Institute for Geoscience Research said that identifying such a large number of lunar craters was a result of using computer modelling of the lunar gravity and topography data, where regional features were removed to reveal more detailed basins that would otherwise be obscured using other techniques.
“Our curiosity-driven work initially focused on the identification of two basins on the lunar far side, but was extended during the peer-review process of scientific papers so as to cover the whole Moon,” Featherstone said.
“The dark side of the Moon is particularly challenging because Moon-orbiting satellites cannot be tracked from Earth when they are over the far side,” he said.
Featherstone said the team was optimistic about further discoveries after applying their techniques to the new gravity data collected by NASA’s GRAIL mission, which ceased when the two satellites – named Ebb and Flow – were deliberately crashed on the Moon on 17 December 2012.
Credit : Business Standard
Picture Credit : Google
