AS101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Lunar Prospector, Lunar Craters, Lunar Orbiter Program
Document Summary
The most obvious features of the moon"s surface appearance, even to the naked eye, are the large dark areas (called maria) looking much like lunar seas, and lighter- coloured regions (called highlands) resembling continents. 14 named maria exist on the lunar surface, the largest named mare imbrium. Maria are actually large flat areas resulting from lava flows early in the moon"s history. The lunar highlands are covered with hundreds of craters of all sizes (hundreds of km across down to microscopic diameters). Apollo 8 astronauts during the first circumnavigation of the moon in 1968. The 14 maria all have interesting latin names (mare imbrium sea of showers, ); mountain ranges bear the names of earth ranges (alps, pyrenees, etc. ); craters are named after philosophers or scientists (plato, eratosthenes, copernicus, etc. Lunar craters are all "impact" craters and are not v olcanic in origin and were formed by meteoritic bombardment from outer space.
