The Contribution of Small Impact Craters to Lunar Polar Wander
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Changes in mass distribution affect the gravitational figure and reorient a planetary body’s surface with respect to its rotational axis. The mass anomalies in the present-day lunar gravity field can reveal how the figure an...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
American Astronomical Society
2023
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/148217 |
| _version_ | 1826199998325325824 |
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| author | Smith, David E Viswanathan, Vishnu Mazarico, Erwan Goossens, Sander Head, James W Neumann, Gregory A Zuber, Maria T |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Smith, David E Viswanathan, Vishnu Mazarico, Erwan Goossens, Sander Head, James W Neumann, Gregory A Zuber, Maria T |
| author_sort | Smith, David E |
| collection | MIT |
| description | <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>Changes in mass distribution affect the gravitational figure and reorient a planetary body’s surface with respect to its rotational axis. The mass anomalies in the present-day lunar gravity field can reveal how the figure and pole position have evolved over the Moon’s history. By examining sequentially each individual crater and basin, working backward in time order through the catalog of nearly 5200 craters and basins between 1200 and 20 km in diameter, we investigate their contribution to the lunar gravitational figure and reconstruct the evolution of the pole position by extracting their gravitational signatures from the present-day Moon. We find that craters and basins in this diameter range, which excludes South Pole–Aitken, have contributed to nearly 25% of the present-day power from the Moon’s degree-2 gravitational figure and resulted in a total displacement of the Moon’s pole by ∼10° along the Earth–Moon tidal axis over the past ∼4.25 billion years. This also implies that the geographical location of the Moon’s rotational pole has not moved since ∼3.8 Ga by more than ∼2° in latitude owing to impacts, and this has implications for the long-term stability of volatiles in the polar regions.</jats:p> |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T11:29:07Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/148217 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T11:29:07Z |
| publishDate | 2023 |
| publisher | American Astronomical Society |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1482172023-02-27T03:31:38Z The Contribution of Small Impact Craters to Lunar Polar Wander Smith, David E Viswanathan, Vishnu Mazarico, Erwan Goossens, Sander Head, James W Neumann, Gregory A Zuber, Maria T Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Changes in mass distribution affect the gravitational figure and reorient a planetary body’s surface with respect to its rotational axis. The mass anomalies in the present-day lunar gravity field can reveal how the figure and pole position have evolved over the Moon’s history. By examining sequentially each individual crater and basin, working backward in time order through the catalog of nearly 5200 craters and basins between 1200 and 20 km in diameter, we investigate their contribution to the lunar gravitational figure and reconstruct the evolution of the pole position by extracting their gravitational signatures from the present-day Moon. We find that craters and basins in this diameter range, which excludes South Pole–Aitken, have contributed to nearly 25% of the present-day power from the Moon’s degree-2 gravitational figure and resulted in a total displacement of the Moon’s pole by ∼10° along the Earth–Moon tidal axis over the past ∼4.25 billion years. This also implies that the geographical location of the Moon’s rotational pole has not moved since ∼3.8 Ga by more than ∼2° in latitude owing to impacts, and this has implications for the long-term stability of volatiles in the polar regions.</jats:p> 2023-02-24T18:05:53Z 2023-02-24T18:05:53Z 2022 2023-02-24T17:52:39Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/148217 Smith, David E, Viswanathan, Vishnu, Mazarico, Erwan, Goossens, Sander, Head, James W et al. 2022. "The Contribution of Small Impact Craters to Lunar Polar Wander." The Planetary Science Journal, 3 (9). en 10.3847/PSJ/AC8C39 The Planetary Science Journal Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ application/pdf American Astronomical Society IOP Publishing |
| spellingShingle | Smith, David E Viswanathan, Vishnu Mazarico, Erwan Goossens, Sander Head, James W Neumann, Gregory A Zuber, Maria T The Contribution of Small Impact Craters to Lunar Polar Wander |
| title | The Contribution of Small Impact Craters to Lunar Polar Wander |
| title_full | The Contribution of Small Impact Craters to Lunar Polar Wander |
| title_fullStr | The Contribution of Small Impact Craters to Lunar Polar Wander |
| title_full_unstemmed | The Contribution of Small Impact Craters to Lunar Polar Wander |
| title_short | The Contribution of Small Impact Craters to Lunar Polar Wander |
| title_sort | contribution of small impact craters to lunar polar wander |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/148217 |
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