Why It’s So Hard To Date a Crater
9 Jul 2012, 05:15 UTC
The 13-mile (21-km) wide Giordano Bruno crater on the Moon’s far side was recently imaged by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at an angle at a time when the setting sun cast long shadows, creating the high-relief image seen above. It’s known that the brightly-rayed crater is relatively young (see the video below) but how young? [...]
Panorama of a sunset-lit Giordano Bruno crater, imaged by LRO (NASA/GSFC/ Arizona State University)
The 13-mile (21-km) wide Giordano Bruno crater on the Moon’s far side was recently imaged by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at an angle at a time when the setting sun cast long shadows, creating the high-relief image seen above. It’s known that the brightly-rayed crater is relatively young (see the video below) but how young? It could be anywhere from 834 years old (if some Medieval accounts are to be accepted as accurate descriptions of the crater’s formation) to 2 to 4 million years old, up to even 10 million years old — of which there would obviously be no written documentation. So why is it so hard to date a crater?
Basically, without a sample of the material within the crater itself there’s no way to know for certain ...
