Apollo Basin: Mare in a Sea of Highlands

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Caption:

This is a high resolution LROC image of floor of the Apollo Basin, a large (538 km diameter) double-ringed impact crater in the southern hemisphere of the far side. This image shows part of the boundary between two flow units within the volcanic mare deposits on the crater's floor. The sharp boundary between the topographically higher lavas on the right side of the image and the lower ones on the left reveals layers, suggesting that multiple volcanic events were involved in forming some of the isolated volcanic plateaus seen within the otherwise uniform crater floor lava flows. Both the high and low materials here are heavily covered in impact craters, indicating that these lavas, like much of the Moon's surface, are ancient. Many boulders can also be seen shedding out of the upper layers and eroding down onto the lower deposits. Image is 880 meters wide, and north is up. Part of NAC frame M114953774LE.

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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