Terraced Wall in Bürg Crater

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Caption:

LROC NAC frame closeup of crater wall and terrace in Bürg crater (45.0°N, 28.2°E). The outer rim of the crater is along the right side of the frame. Image width is 1.62 km

Bürg is a 40-km diameter, Copernican-aged, complex crater located within Lacus Mortis (the Lake of Death) on the nearside of the Moon. Complex craters, like this one, have terraced walls and a central peak (not shown here). The rim of the crater is along the right side and the walls slope down towards the left of the image. The terrace shown is ~1 km wide and is pockmarked with smaller craters. Terraces form as sections of the crater wall slump downward after the impact. Note that there are very few impact craters on the wall of the crater. Usually fewer craters indicate a surface is younger, however in this case its simply that material slides down the crater wall's steep slopes erasing craters.

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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