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What is the newest crater on the moon?


Swoop1

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According to this site the youngest crater could be as old as 41 years old. The area was photographed in 1971 during the Apollo 15 mission and again in 2009 by the LRO. The crater was not there in 1971 but visible in the 2009 photo. The crater is no more than 10 metres across so you will need a very big telescope to see it.

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2 minutes ago, Cornelius Varley said:

According to this site the youngest crater could be as old as 41 years old. The area was photographed in 1971 during the Apollo 15 mission and again in 2009 by the LRO. The crater was not there in 1971 but visible in the 2009 photo. The crater is no more than 10 metres across so you will need a very big telescope to see it.

Interesting stuff. Given that I image the moon with my C8 at 400m per pixel (i.e. a resolution limit of 800m), you would need 80x the aperture, or a whopping 16m for this crater to be resolved, ignoring seeing. The Hubble certainly cannot, but the future E-ELT would, with adaptive optics, in theory be able to

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An object was caught on video impacting the Moon a year or so ago. It would probably have formed a crater of sorts but would be below the resolution limit of a telescope I would think. Still hard to comprehend, looking at the apparently pristine condition of many craters that even "young" ones are over 100 million years old.  :icon_biggrin:

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6 hours ago, Peter Drew said:

An object was caught on video impacting the Moon a year or so ago. It would probably have formed a crater of sorts but would be below the resolution limit of a telescope I would think. Still hard to comprehend, looking at the apparently pristine condition of many craters that even "young" ones are over 100 million years old.  :icon_biggrin:

I remember that but wasn't it a load of rubbish in the end??

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On 10/05/2017 at 16:35, spaceboy said:

I remember that but wasn't it a load of rubbish in the end??

Yes turned out to be martians, but its a big secret dont tell anyone. I hear there is a secret moon base on the other side of the moon.

But yes, on a serious note I always thought it was Tycho.

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Generally the smaller the crater the more recent the impact. Some of the tiniest craters visible in amateur telescopes have brilliant ejecta tightly surrounding them but not nrcessarily with rays. Such craters are among the youngest. Smaller craters always overlap larger ones indicating the bombardment by large bodies took place first and over time, the impactors became less massive, creating smaller craters. You'd probably need a very powerful scope to see a truly recent impact.

Mike

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Of course you do have the story of the 5 Canterbrury monks who witnessed a strange impact on the moon in 1178 which could have formed the 22km wide crater 'Giordano Bruno' crater that can be seen during a favourable liberation. Although their is some evidence to support this story the general theory is that is much older nice idea though!

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Given that meteorites strike the earth's atmosphere on a very regular basis I would assume that they also strike the Moon with the same relative frequency but do not burn-up before hitting the surface? No doubt the craters they create will be too small to observe from here but presumably they do exist?

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