Thursday, September 30, 2010

Extensive Copernicus ejecta

Extensive Copernicus ejecta
One of the geologic features that makes Copernicus crater special is its extensive, high-reflectance ejecta rays that extend across nearby mare and superpose (overlap) ejecta from other craters - Copernican ejecta extends more than 500 km from the impact site. In this high-Sun image, albedo differences are enhanced and the arrows indicate several "fingers" of ejecta and the direction of ejecta emplacement (away from Copernicus, which is to the southwest). 470 meter-wide field of view from LROC NAC observation M127050121L, LRO orbit 3857, April 27, 2010, spacecraft and camera slew 11.6° west from nadir, angle of incidence 30.4° at 47 centimeters per pixel resolution from 37.69 km [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].
Lillian Ostrach
LROC News System

Check out Wilhelms' Geologic History of the Moon for more information about Copernicus crater and the lunar geologic timescale.

Copernicus context for LROC NAC M127050121LE
LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC) mosaic of monochrome (689 nm) observations of high illumination incidence angles captured over several sequential orbits in early January 2010. Familiar Copernicus (93 km diameter) is the result, overlaid on the lunar digital elevation model available through the Google Moon (v5) application. The arrow indicates the approximate position of the area shown at high resolution in the LROC Featured Image released September 30, 2010 and the blue boundary outlines the area captured in the LROC NAC observation seen in the corrected format below [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].
Copernicus (early LROC WAC color)
LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC) visible to ultra-violet portrait of Copernicus in a 458 km-wide field of view, showing some degree of the extensive ejecta of the familiar Copernicus impact, a benchmark for dating lunar stratigraphy. LROC Featured Image, illustrating the post on that very subject written by principal investigator Mark Robinson, March 20, 2012 [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].
Discover the Copernicus ejecta deposits for yourself in the full LROC (corrected) Narrow Angle Camera frame, HERE.

Related Posts:
Central Peak of Copernicus Crater

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