Thursday, April 14, 2022

Why Does the Farside Have More Craters?

 It's not necessarily a bad thing. One day we might be able to turn one of them into an amazing radio telescope.

But it's an interesting observation that the farside of the moon...which we don't see...has a lot more craters.

Is it because it's tidally locked?

No.

It's because the near side has huge lava fields that covered up a lot of the craters. With no atmosphere, there's very little erosion on the moon.

And these lava fields were created by a huge collision, which made the South Pole-Aitken basin, a huge crater 1,600 miles wide. We now know that the asymmetric nature of the lava field was because of the heat plume flowing more easily on the nearside.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm8475

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