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Published March 26, 2013 09:19 AM
The Great Lunar Cataclysm
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The Late Heavy Bombardment (commonly referred to as the lunar cataclysm) is a hypothetical event around 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago. During this event a very large number of the impact craters on the Moon would have formed, and by inference on Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars as well. The evidence for this event comes primarily from the dating of lunar samples brought back by the Apollo astronauts, which indicates that most impact melt rocks formed in this rather narrow interval of time. While many hypotheses have been put forth to explain a spike in the flux of asteroids or comets in the inner Solar System at this time, no consensus yet exists as to its cause. Scientists from NASA's Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) in Moffett Field, Calif., discovered that the same population of high-speed projectiles that impacted our lunar neighbor four billion years ago, also hit the giant asteroid Vesta and perhaps other large asteroids. The research unveils an unexpected link between Vesta and the moon, and provides new means for studying the early bombardment history of terrestrial planets. The findings are published in the March issue of Nature Geoscience. ADVERTISEMENT "It's always intriguing when interdisciplinary research changes the way we understand the history of our solar system," said Yvonne Pendleton, NLSI director. "Although the moon is located far from Vesta, which is in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, they seem to share some of the same bombardment history."The findings support the theory that the repositioning of gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn from their original orbits to their current location destabilized portions of the asteroid belt and triggered a solar system-wide bombardment of asteroids billions of years ago, called the lunar cataclysm.There are several theories as to what caused the cataclysm. For example, the existence of a planet between Mars and Jupiter that eventually was destroyed or a fifth gas giant that also was eventually destroyed or flung out of the solar system. The research provides new constraints on the start and duration of the lunar cataclysm, and demonstrates that the cataclysm was an event that affected not only the inner solar system planets, but the asteroid belt as well.The moon rocks brought back by NASA Apollo astronauts have long been used to study the bombardment history of the moon. Now the ages derived from meteorite samples have been used to study the collisional history of main belt asteroids. In particular, howardite and eucrite meteorites, which are common species found on Earth, have been used to study asteroid Vesta, their parent body. Researchers have linked these two datasets and found that the same population of projectiles responsible for making craters and basins on the moon were also hitting Vesta at very high velocities, enough to leave behind a number of telltale, impact-related ages."It appears that the asteroidal meteorites show signs of the asteroid belt losing a lot of mass four billion years ago, with the escaped mass beating up on both the surviving main belt asteroids and the moon at high speeds" says lead author Simone Marchi, who has a joint appointment between two of NASA's Lunar Science Institutes, one at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and another at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. For further information see Moon and Vesta.Cataclysm image via Wikipedia. Tweet