MIT-Led Mission Reveals the Moon's Battered Crust Is Riddled With Cracks

A reader sends this quote from the Boston Globe: "The moon's battered crust is riddled with deep fractures that may extend miles underground, according to the first findings from two NASA spacecraft orbiting Earth's nearest neighbor. The results of the mission, led by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist, surprised researchers, who said it will provide new insight into the evolution of the early solar system, and even help inform the search for life on Mars. Announced Wednesday, the discoveries are also a reminder that the familiar moon still holds secrets four decades after NASA ended its manned missions there. 'We have known that the moon's crust and other planetary crusts have been bombarded by impacts, but none of us could have predicted just how cracked the lunar crust is,' said Maria Zuber, the MIT geoscientist who led the mission, called GRAIL." Here are the abstracts from the three studies published in Science.

The mission let kids select lunar pictures

[sighted]

One of the interesting parts of this mission is MoonKAM [ucsd.edu], which let grade school and middle school kids select targets on the lunar surface for the orbiters' cameras to inspect. It returned some pretty interesting (if low-res) images until a solar flare recently took the imaging system down. If you're interested, there's some more info about GRAIL: today's announcement from NASA [nasa.gov], and a public lecture [nasa.gov] tomorrow with a live feed.

Re:What do you expect from a piece of Swiss cheese

[ThatsMyNick]

Green cheese refers to fresh cheese (one that has not completely dried out). With cracks and battered crust, it apparently is not made of green cheese.