Boulder in Recht Crater

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Caption:

Inside the wall of Recht crater rests a 130 meter long boulder. Image resolution is 0.56 m/px and the incidence angle is 20°.

Recht crater (~19 km in diameter) is located on the lunar farside, at 9.8°N, 124°E. The boulder is located on the northern half of Recht crater's interior wall and is 130 meters long, or about one and a half times as long as an American football field. Boulder fields on the Moon are common. Large boulder fields are usually part of an ejecta deposit surrounding the parent crater. It is also common for boulders to gather where blocks on a slope are dislodged from the regolith or rock outcrops in a process known as gravity-driven mass wasting. However, the boulder in today's Featured Image has no boulder trail, so it probably was emplaced at the time of the impact that created Recht crater. After the initial impact, the boulder fell as part of the impact ejecta and, as material on the wall of the crater settled, was partially covered with wall material.

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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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