The Floor of Saha E

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Caption:

Diverse textures on the floor of Saha E on the lunar farside. This texture could be the result of impact melt coating boulders and other deposits on the floor of the crater. Image width is 1.08 km.

The lava-like melt produced by impacts on the Moon can have a variety of morphologies. The polygonal texture you see here is located on the floor of crater Saha E, a 28 km diameter crater east of Mare Smythii. This texture could be the result of impact melt coating boulders and other deposits on the floor of the crater. From the perspective of exploration planning, impact melt deposits are scientifically interesting because they can be used to age-date impacts. Impact melts can also contain geochemical traces of the original impact, and often contain small fragments of the original pre-impact target rocks.

Background Info:

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center built and manages the mission for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera was designed to acquire data for landing site certification and to conduct polar illumination studies and global mapping. Operated by Arizona State University, the LROC facility is part of the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE). LROC consists of a pair of narrow-angle cameras (NAC) and a single wide-angle camera (WAC). The mission is expected to return over 70 terabytes of image data.

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