Ejecta from Van de Graaff Crater

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Caption:

The texture of ejecta thrown from Van de Graaff Crater along the northern rim, seen from a low Sun angle in the NAC image (incidence angle is 72°). This subset of the NAC image M115177455R has a width of 980 meters (3215 feet).

Van de Graaff crater is located on the farside of the Moon south of Aitken crater, at about latitude -27.9, longitude 172.8. Two merged craters make up the formation known as Van de Graaff crater, named after the American physicist. Unlike other merged craters on the Moon, there is no rim separating the two "sections" of the crater. A relatively strong magnetic field was detected near this crater by the Apollo 15 subsatellite magnetometer. This discovery was unusual for the lunar surface because the Moon does not currently have a global magnetic field like the Earth does. Also, Van de Graaff and the surrounding area also have slightly higher concentrations of thorium, a radioactive metal.

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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