Complex Numbers

Canyons on the Moon

Kinda-sorta still technically a Full Moon this morning (not that I could see it last night through all the clouds), and then this NPR article comes up at random from my queue:

    The moon's grand canyons were carved in the blink of an eye  

The Grand Canyon in Arizona got carved by water over millions of years of slow but steady erosion.

Or, if you believe bullshit, it got created that way about 6000 years ago, specifically to fool us.

Two similarly-sized canyons on the moon got carved by flying rocks in about ten minutes.

Also way more than 6000 years ago.

"This was a dramatic impact that was followed by a series of smaller impact events that excavated these canyons in, you know, roughly 10 minutes," says David Kring with the USRA Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

Translation: The Moon's shit got fucked up.

The two canyons, called Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck...

So, one of them may or may not actually exist, and the other is as small as it's possible to get?

If you don't know anything about the history of physics, just take my word for it: that's a really, really funny joke.

...are located on the far side of the moon...

Hm. Most far side features are named for Russians, because they were first mapped by a Soviet probe. I guess there are exceptions, and I'm too lazy to look to see if there are other exceptions.

...so they can only be seen from orbit—not from Earth.

As this is unclear, I'll jump in to say that they mean either lunar orbit, or an Earth orbit that's so far out that it takes you around the butt side of the moon.

Butt Side of the Moon is, by coincidence, the name of my Butthole Surfers style cover of Pink Floyd's greatest album.

Each canyon is over 165 miles long and over 1.5 miles deep.

Oh, so they're American canyons?

The canyons look like remarkably straight lines that extend outward from a circular crater that is the Schrödinger impact basin, the result of a large impact that occurred around 3.8 billion years ago.

Or maybe it didn't occur.

Look, Schrödinger jokes never get old. Unlike these canyons.

When the impactor hit the moon, it was moving at roughly 38,000 miles per hour, says Kring, and would have penetrated to a depth of about 15 miles.

And the impactor was also American, it seems.

The amount of energy needed to produce these grand canyons on the moon is 1200–2200 times larger than "the nuclear explosion energy once planned to excavate a second Panama Canal on Earth, more than 700 times larger than the total yield of US, USSR, and China's nuclear explosion tests, and about 130 times larger than the energy in the global inventory of nuclear weapons," the researchers write in their report.

How much is that in gridiron football fields? You know, since we're measuring everything else with American units.

Even though these particular lunar craters aren't visible from your backyard, Kring says there are similar, but smaller canyons on the near side of the moon that's visible in the night sky.

Might need binoculars or a telescope, but those are a bit cheaper than hitching a ride on the next lunar orbiter.