Far side of the moon revealed in amazing mosaic of orbiter images!

reply to post by lektrofellon


Why is there a line going down the middle of this picture ...lookst like photoshop or somthing fake

reply to post by diggsnicca


[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/0230436c8c82.jpg[/atsimg]

Originally posted by diggsnicca
reply to post by lektrofellon

 

Why is there a line going down the middle of this picture ...lookst like photoshop or somthing fake

This has already been addressed, and the explanantion is in the first line of the OP's post.

This is a composite mosaic image made up of 15,000 smaller images. There are seams where the images come together, including a common seam right down the center of the mosaic.

EDIT TO ADD:
Another reason the center seam stands out is because the people putting the images together (students and researchers at the Arizona State University) wanted to get the best sun-angle to view the craters -- so most of the right side is sunlit from the right, and most of the left side is sunlit from the left, making the craters in the middle look odd because many have shadows on both the left and right rims.

Originally posted by uncuuncu
I find it hard to believe that the reason the far side is never visible from Earth

is because the moon spins once on its axis in precisely the same amount of time it takes to revolve around the Earth...these two intervals have been equal for all of recorded history, and probably for millions of years or longer.

Maybe the moon really is an alien spacecraft with intelligent control

I once had a dream that we had ancient technology on this planet hidden in the worlds ancient sites that can move the moon as a shield to protect from meteors. Thats why its so battered. Got me thinking when i woke up.

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People

Originally posted by diggsnicca
reply to post by lektrofellon

 

Why is there a line going down the middle of this picture ...lookst like photoshop or somthing fake

This has already been addressed, and the explanantion is in the first line of the OP's post.

This is a composite mosaic image made up of 15,000 smaller images. There are seams where the images come together, including a common seam right down the center of the mosaic.

Notice how the left side has craters and the right side looks like bubbles?

Originally posted by Shadow Herder
Notice how the left side has craters and the right side looks like bubbles?

edit on 17-3-2011 by Shadow Herder because: (no reason given)

This has already been explained here:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

To make the craters show up best, the images chosen for this mosaic have the sun-angle for the craters on the left side of the image, so the craters are lit mostly from the left, while the craters on the right are mostly sun-lit from the right.

Originally posted by nataylor

Originally posted by OuttaTime
Really odd indeed. It doesn't seem to mesh up with:



But in further observation, isn't it really strange that all them craters have shallow flat bottoms? Isn't the moon kinda soft on the outside? With craters that large, wouldn't the impact depth be deeper?

Actually, the larger the impact, the smaller the ratio of a crater's depth to its diameter. That's because a large portion of the material excavated in the impact falls back down in the crater, like a drop of water.

A larger impact leaves a smaller shallower crater? The one that hit Arizona ~40,000 years ago sure left a giant hole and it was assumed that the meteor itself was about the size of a house, and even our atmosphere and gravity didn't fill it. And those types of impacts don't fall straight back down, as they are ejected angularly. But since gravity is basically non existent on the moon, it would be no surprise that the ejecta was cast into space, along with the meteor. The smaller impacts seem to be properly concaved and implicative of small debris impact with no interior fill-in, where as the large craters penetrated no deeper than the small ones. Without getting into the artificial moon theory, that impact phenomenon can't be vindicated beyond the fact that the outer crust is powdery and the core is harder than the meteors that impact it, as impact energy would propagate a larger spall.

I would guess

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People


Good observation. I'm no lunar mapping genius by a long shot. I cannot find the pics online, but a while back I happened to come across pics of the dark side and it appeared to be more riddled and scarred with impacts. I think it was on a moon conspiracy site as they were discussing fissures and 'lights' near the fissures. I didn't pay much attention tho observations as I was just curious about what the back side looked like

FWIW, there was talk of when the lunar lander (Apollo 12 I think, maybe 11 or 14) frame struck the moon, the astronauts calimed that they heard a ringing sound for about 30 minutes.

Originally posted by OuttaTime
A larger impact leaves a smaller shallower crater?

No, a larger impact leaves a crater with a smaller depth to diameter ratio.

An impact that generates a crater 1,000 meters wide might be 200 meters deep. An impact that that leaves a 10,000 meter crater might be 600 meters deep. An 100,000 meter crater might only be only 1,200 meters deep. So while the diameter of our crater has increased by 100 times, the depth has only increased by 6 times.

Originally posted by OuttaTime

FWIW, there was talk of when the lunar lander (Apollo 12 I think, maybe 11 or 14) frame struck the moon, the astronauts calimed that they heard a ringing sound for about 30 minutes.

edit on 17-3-2011 by OuttaTime because: (no reason given)

You're talking about when the Apollo 13 S-IVB impacted the moon, roughly 140 km from where Apollo 12 had set up a seismometer. The seismometer detected the vibrations from the impact. The astronauts didn't actually hear anything.

Originally posted by OuttaTime

Originally posted by nataylor
Actually, the larger the impact, the smaller the ratio of a crater's depth to its diameter. That's because a large portion of the material excavated in the impact falls back down in the crater, like a drop of water.

A larger impact leaves a smaller shallower crater?

Not shallower in absolute terms, just that the ratio of the depth to the diameter is smaller - i.e. Arizona's Meteor Crater is 800' deep and 4,000 feet across ( 1:5), while Tycho crater is 3 miles deep and 53 miles across (1:17.67).

This is because the results of really large impacts are fundamentally different from smaller one, Meteor Crater may look big to us (it took me an hour to hike around it), but it's one of the small ones. If it was on the Moon, it would be too small to see in these telescope videos.

You described the effects of an impact like that perfectly: BOOM!, debris goes flying, leaving a bowl-shaped crater. The impact explosion happens when the kinetic energy of the rock moving at many miles per second converts into heat - a lot of heat. The rock and the surface it hits are vaporized, and the vapor expands outwards at high speed, carrying the debris with it. For small impacts, the vapor and the hot debris also carry away the heat, and the punctured bedrock left behind is cool enough to hold the bowl-shape.

The explosion that formed Meteor Crater was roughly equivalent to 20 megatons of TNT. The impacts that formed the larger craters that you're asking about were in the range of millions of megatons. That much heat doesn't get blown away - it makes the bedrock white-hot and it melts. The molten rock (lava, really) flows and fills the bottom of the crater, It eventually cools, hardens and forms the flat bottom you see in all craters above a certain size.

Intermediate-sized craters (like Tycho and Copernicus) often have a central peak that's formed from lava, forced out from the center by the explosion, splashing back to the middle and hardening. The really big craters (like Clavius) usually don't have this because the crater stays hot enough long enough to melt the peak like a scoop of ice cream left out in a bowl.

Here is a cool vid taken by the HD video camera on the Japanese Kaguya probe. First we flay over Tycho, a big crater with a flat bottom and central peak. Heading south, we see Clavius, a really big crater with a flat bottom and no peak. Inside Clavius - which is an old crater - we see several newer craters that are small and show the distinctive bowl-shape. So you have all three types in this one video:




This next video is computer generated (and extremely bitchin'). The Japanese Space Agency made it from images from Kaguya's Terrain Mapping Camera, and it's what it would be like to fly around inside Tycho crater. You can clearly see the congealed & cracked lava on the floor of the crater:



That was the best resolution we had of Tycho we had until the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter arrived and mapped the entire floor at .5 meter resolution. Here is one of those images.

Thanks for the insight guys. I had usually observed the moon as my desktop wallpaper and it looks as though many of the craters did not penetrate too far beyond each other, and many of them looked more like calderas (without lava flow) than craters. And in looking at some large craters, they were within mammoth craters, which also give the illusion of not penetrating very far. I stand corrected on the astronauts 'hearing' the impact. That info did come from a moon conspiracy site. But it was a resonant seizmographic event right? I'm not making any assumptions at this point, but my observations don't quite jive with encyclopedic academia.
I mean, do we even know if the 'actual footprints on the moon' have begun filling in after a few decades?

Originally posted by SecretxHouse
Its the Deathstar from star wars watch out!!!

perhaps. Either way see my previous illustrations.. The vertical lighter lines may be from strip mining Helium 2 from the surface.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/677a567bf431.jpg[/atsimg]

The moon still has magma to refill large impacts, but most of the large impacts happened billions of years ago when larger rogue object were about when the moon was more seismically active.


The moon has plenty gravity, about 1/6th of what the earth has, that is exactly equivalent to it's relative mass. So you wont hit a golf drive into orbit, you need to try that on a much smaller astroid.

thankx for the replys lads...that makes sence, but it did look eerie the way they curve upwards...

sothey should call it a `simple version` of the back of the moon

reply to post by uncuuncu

your joking right?...

you cant wrap your head around the fact that 2 planets may be perfectly aligned. yet you can fully grasp the idea of life in the universe? we are just as big of a astronomical fluke.

just because it adds up doesnt mean it was positioned or being controlled.

if the moon rotated 10x the speed of earth precisely you would think the exact same way. think of all the infinte possibilities. atleast 1 solar system has to have a perfect balance, why not this one? it doesnt mean its special.

reply to post by lektrofellon


Great Thread!

Great Find

reply to post by Saint Exupery

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People


Thanks for all the info guys,im by no means an expert on any of this stuff but have learned a lot from your posts!

And that double face palm was hilarious,perfect timing on that one!

reply to post by epitaph.one

In fact it's far from special.

The reason the Moon always keeps the same face toward the Earth is perfectly normal and is expected in orbital mechanics. That's why this same thing happens for at least 30 other major moons in the solar system. As people have pointed out before, Jupiter has 8 moons that do this, Saturn has 15 moons that do this, and Uranus has 5 moons that orbit like this -- plus other moons of other planets.

Its not "odd" for a large moon orbiting relatively close to a planet to show only one face to it's parent planet, but rather it is normal and predictable.

Originally posted by BrokenCircles
I am kind of surprised by this image though. I expected it to have more and much larger craters. I would think that side would, in general, have been hit more than the side facing the Earth.

That's the very first thing that came to my mind when i saw this..... How does the side facing us have larger craters than the side exposed to space? It's really strange...