Lunar Swirls at the Mare Ingenii

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Caption:

Close-up image of the Mare Ingenii Constellation Region of Interest . Mare Ingenii is one of the few mare basalt deposits on the farside of the Moon. What makes Mare Ingenii even more unique is that it contains one of the most rare and strange geological features on the Moon: lunar swirls.

Lunar swirls are bright markings found on both mare and highland portions of the Moon. They appear as high albedo swirls and patches. They have no topography, as they are only surficial in nature. Swirls range in size from meters to tens of kilometers in length. The swirls are commonly found antipodal to huge young impact basins: Orientale, Imbrium and Crisium, but also within the large basins at Mare Ingenii, near the Airy Crater, and at Mare Moscoviense. They are accompanied by relatively high magnetic anomalies, which is surprising for a planetary body that does not, and may never have had, an active core dynamo with which to generate a magnetic field. The shapes of the swirls hint at a magnetic origin. Image width is 800 meters (875 yards). [LROC-NAC M105795162R].

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, 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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