Kepler Crater Ejecta

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Caption:

Large boulder ejected from Kepler crater, a small depression from the boulder's impact is just visible. LROC NAC M140155410L, image width is 800 meters (2625 feet).

Kepler is a Copernican aged crater (32 kilometers (20 miles) diameter, 8.1°N, 322.0°E) named for the German Astronomer Johannes Kepler, famous for his three laws of planetary motion. The impact event that created Kepler crater was energetic enough to eject this 100 meters (328 feet) boulder out onto its continuous ejecta blanket. Impact events excavate material from great depth (approximately 1/3 the transient crater diameter) and distribute the material around the crater as ejecta. The material at the top of the impacted surface is ejected the furthest, while the deepest material has just enough energy to land on the crater rim. This distance to depth relation creates a natural core sample for astronauts to collect as they explore.

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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