The Contribution of Small Impact Craters to Lunar Polar Wander
| dc.contributor.author | Smith, David E. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Viswanathan, Vishnu | |
| dc.contributor.author | Mazarico, Erwan | |
| dc.contributor.author | Goossens, Sander | |
| dc.contributor.author | Head, James W. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Neumann, Gregory A. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Zuber, Maria T. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-10-14T16:16:04Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2022-10-14T16:16:04Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022-09-19 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Changes in mass distribution affect the gravitational figure and reorient a planetary body’s surface with respect to its rotational axis. The mass anomalies in the present-day lunar gravity field can reveal how the figure and pole position have evolved over the Moon’s history. By examining sequentially each individual crater and basin, working backward in time order through the catalog of nearly 5200 craters and basins between 1200 and 20 km in diameter, we investigate their contribution to the lunar gravitational figure and reconstruct the evolution of the pole position by extracting their gravitational signatures from the present-day Moon. We find that craters and basins in this diameter range, which excludes South Pole–Aitken, have contributed to nearly 25% of the present-day power from the Moon’s degree-2 gravitational figure and resulted in a total displacement of the Moon’s pole by ∼10° along the Earth–Moon tidal axis over the past ∼4.25 billion years. This also implies that the geographical location of the Moon’s rotational pole has not moved since ∼3.8 Ga by more than ∼2° in latitude owing to impacts, and this has implications for the long-term stability of volatiles in the polar regions | en_US |
| dc.description.sponsorship | The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter project to the LOLA investigation for this study. Support for this research was provided by NASA’s Planetary Science Division Research Program. Portions of this material are based on work supported by NASA under award Nos. 80NSSC18K0553 (MIT; contributions from D.E.S.), 80GSFC17M0002/80GSFC21M0002 (UMBC-CRESST II; contributions from V.V. and S.G.), and 80NSSC19K0605 (Brown; contributions from J.W.H.). Open-source packages used for this study include SHTools for operations on SH coefficients (Wieczorek & Meschede 2018), Astropy for constants and coordinate transformations (The Astropy Collaboration et al. 2018), and seaborn, GMT, and matplotlib for graphics (Waskom 2021; Wessel et al. 2019; Hunter 2007). The authors thank T. J. Sabaka (GSFC) and R. H. Tyler (UMBC/ GSFC) for discussions. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions that helped improve the clarity of the work presented and E. G. Rivera-Valentín for the editorial handling of our manuscript. The GRAIL gravity and LRO-LOLA topography data sets used in the study are available on NASA’s Planetary Data System Geosciences Node at https://pdsgeosciences.wustl.edu/missions/grail/default.htm and https:// pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/lro/lola.htm, respectively. | en_US |
| dc.description.uri | https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ac8c39 | en_US |
| dc.format.extent | 14 pages | en_US |
| dc.genre | journal articles | en_US |
| dc.identifier | doi:10.13016/m246g3-kl9g | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Smith, David E. et al. "The Contribution of Small Impact Craters to Lunar Polar Wander." The Planetary Science Journal 3, no. 9 (19 September 2022). https://doi.org/10.3847/PSJ/ac8c39 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://doi.org/10.3847/PSJ/ac8c39 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11603/26189 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | en_US |
| dc.publisher | IOP | en_US |
| dc.relation.isAvailableAt | The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) | |
| dc.relation.ispartof | UMBC Center for Space Sciences and Technology | |
| dc.relation.ispartof | UMBC Faculty Collection | |
| dc.rights | This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law. | en_US |
| dc.rights | Public Domain Mark 1.0 | * |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/ | * |
| dc.title | The Contribution of Small Impact Craters to Lunar Polar Wander | en_US |
| dc.type | Text | en_US |
| dcterms.creator | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9027-8588 | en_US |