Moon’s Rough ‘Wrinkles’ Reveal Clues to Its Past

Written on the Moon’s weary face are the damages it has endured for the past 4.5 billion years. From impact craters to the dark plains of maria left behind by volcanic eruptions, the scars are all that remain to tell the tale of what happened to the Moon. But they only hint at the processes that once acted — and act today — to shape the surface. To get more insight into those processes, Meg Rosenburg and her colleagues at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. put together the first comprehensive set of maps revealing the slopes and roughness of the Moon’s surface. These maps are based on detailed data collected by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. LOLA and LRO were built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. More