This large area provides numerous meter size landing spots on now frozen deposit of impact melt. Next, you have to build the sample return spacecraft and land it safely on the Moon. This is no small feat, but keep in mind that the Soviet Union did this successfully three times almost four decades ago. While on the surface, key supporting measurements would be acquired; images, spectral measurements, magnetic properties, and perhaps information about surface radiation exposure to help design safer spacecraft and spacesuits for future astronauts.
Finally, after no more than a lunar day on the surface, a sample is scooped up and then returned to Earth. What would we learn? Of course, we'd learn about the age of formation of Giordano Bruno crater, but also much more. Be sure and check out the amazing details in the full resolution complete oblique mosaic of Giordano Bruno crater.
Such an impact would have triggered a blizzard-like, week-long meteor storm on Earth -- yet there are no accounts of such a storm in any known historical record, including the European, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese and Korean astronomical archives. Withers reported his analysis and other tests of the hypothesis in this month's issue of Meteoritics and Planetary Science.
About an hour after sunset on June 18, A. From the midpoint of this division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out. The body of the moon, which was below writhed. A geologist suggested in that this account is consistent with the location and age of the kilometer mile lunar crater Giordano Bruno, the youngest crater of its size or larger on the Moon. Based on the size of the crater, it must have been a one-to-three kilometer wide a half-mile to almost 2-mile wide asteroid that blasted Giordano Bruno into the Moon's northeast limb.
Such an impact on the Earth would be "civilization threatening" -- so it is important to know if such an event happened on the Moon less than a millennium ago, Withers noted. Left: The impact of a meteorite large enough to form Giordano Bruno would have unleashed a major meteor storm, Withers calculated, comparable to the Leonids meteor shower pictured here. During the '66 storm, as many as , meteors per hour were recorded in some locations. Ten million tons of rock showering the entire Earth as pieces of ejecta about a centimeter across inch-sized fragments for a week is equivalent to 50, meteors each hour.
It would have been a spectacular sight to see! Everyone around the world would have had the opportunity to see the best fireworks show in history," Withers said. Withers believes those five ancient sky-watchers might have seen the fiery display of such a meteor traveling along their line of sight rather than an impact on the moon.
Images B and C are close-ups of regions of interest with arrows pointing to craters larger than meters in diameter. Cumulative size-frequency distributions of craters on the continuous ejecta of Giordano Bruno and three other young craters for comparison. Frequencies of craters per unit area are plotted against crater diameters and used with chronology models to derive the age of the surface.
If a medieval formation hypothesis were correct, then the crater-size distribution for Giordano Bruno would plot on an isochron line of equal age of 1 Ka one thousand years.
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