Contains:  Solar system body or event
Concentric Craters, Astroavani - Avani Soares

Concentric Craters

Concentric Craters, Astroavani - Avani Soares

Concentric Craters

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Concentric Craters

This is the second photo I get from this region and that is the small concentric crater about 6.5km in front of Edymion.

For a better reference I also attached the photo obtained in October of 2015 and that due to a good hovering in altitude shows better its characteristic format. Here is the text that I have posted on the other occasion and I think it will be a glove for this situation.

Can you forget Endyminon for a moment and focus on one small detail?

Observe the photo carefully and see if you notice something different.

Did you see that little concentric crater just below Endymion?

It is part of a very special group of craters that still generate a great debate today.

This concentric crater still without a designation and with about 6.5 km indicated by the arrow in the photo, my attention was drawn to the fact that it is a classical concentric and still has a small craterelet almost exactly in the center thus giving all impression of a target. This can be seen in the attached 3D photo obtained from Quick Map.

Concentric Craters, or CC, are minor features of the Moon that have been ignored for at least 30 years. But now some scientists have looked again at these features. David Trang of the University of Hawaii, and colleagues Jeff Gillis-Davis, Ray Hawke and Ben Bussey, recently published and presented a paper at the Lunar & Planetary Science Conference where they describe finding 14 CCs more than a previous list made at 30 Years ago, using data from the Clementine, Kaguya and LRO probes to distinguish and confirm the identified features. Almost all researchers now agree that the main crater is a small, normal impact crater and the question is whether the inner ring or torus forms in association with that impact or is the result of some endogenous modification (Endogenous is a word that It means that something was created internally rather than created by external forces). David's group has found evidence against the hypothesis that the torus is formed by a simultaneous double impact within the layered target, by volcanism or by viscous relaxation. They noted that the distribution of CC along the edges of the seas is very similar to that of the fractured interior craters. Because cracked interior craters are believed to be impact craters modified by ignoble intrusions, they have proposed, without detail, that these intrusions may also modify the interior of the CCs. This is consistent with the evidence that CCs have a virtually identical spectral signature to that of material located beyond the crater's ring, implying that at least at that point, volcanic extrusions did not occur. David showed this with the 14-km-diameter CC Firmicus C crater as a suggestive example that volcanic material may be associated with CC but is mostly not visible. The small dark spot on the torus appears to be pyroclastic excavated by the small impact crater. It will be interesting to follow the work of these researchers and see if they will be able to find this same type of feature in other CCs and if they can develop an explanation of how an intrusion would create CC morphology.

Source: Space Today

Adaptation and text: Avani Soares

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Concentric Craters, Astroavani - Avani Soares