LRO Captures Sunrise View of Tycho Crater

Officials at the American space agency announce that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) was recently able to capture a series of breathtaking images of a massive lunar crater. The views depict the entire area in exquisite detail, allowing investigators to get more insight into what helped shape it.

Mission controllers flew the orbiter above Tycho Crater on June 10, and used the LRO Camera (LROC) instrument to collect the readings. LROC is outfitted with a pair of narrow-angle cameras (NAC) and a single wide-angle camera (WAC).

The NAC are extremely well suited for collecting oblique views of targets on the lunar surface. Data collected by all three LROC cameras were combined in the dataset that the instrument's science team recently made available on their website.

Tycho Crater was selected for this observations session primarily because it is such a common target for study, among amateur and professional astronomers alike. The landscape feature is about 82 kilometers (51 miles) in diameter.

It is located at 43.37 degrees latitude South by 348.68 degree longitude East. The crater features a central peak, that astronomers calculated extends as 2 kilometers (6562 feet) above the crater floor.

The floor itself lies some 4700 meters (15,420 feet) below the crater rim, and its walls are adorned with distinctive outcrops called clasts. Some of these structures can reach hundreds of meters in size.

According to calculations conducted by geologists, the crater is a relatively new addition to the lunar surface. It formed about 110 million years ago, which is the blink of an eye in geological terms.

The steep slopes that appeared in the process will be turned into smooth mountains as the time passes, and numerous micrometeorites or large asteroids will grind them with impacts. However, this transformation will last several hundred million years.

LROC also imaged this crater from a different vantage point on May 27, 2010, looking at its from directly above. Those datasets reveal the presence of what could very well be impact melt, which is produced when rock is liquefied by the collisions.

The molten rock then spread around the impact site, and eventually solidifies, giving birth to characteristic features in the process. Experts say that some of the most energetic impact give birth to what they plastically refer to as instant mountains.