14 DAY TRIAL // There are many questions about the Earth’s Moon that are still unanswered, and even if it's closer to us than the other planets within the solar system, these questions will subside for a while; all questions except one: which is the highest point on the Moon?
If you ever wandered this, now that over the course of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, the LOLA team has observed that the previously thought highest point on the Moon just got higher.
As the team explained, this is not because the Moon is changing or expanding, it's simply because the LOLA profile coverage increases every month.
Now, on Earth, the highest point is at the summit of Mount Everest, which is 8,848 meters (29,029 feet) above sea level.
Well, the lunar highest point is 1938 meters higher than that of the Earth.
The LOLA team have first narrowed the spot to a small area, and the LROC team commanded a NAC stereo pair on August 12, 2010, to get an even higher resolution measurement of the raising and coordinates of the highest point.
Once the stereo pair got to the ground, the LROC team processed the images into a digital elevation model (DEM), or topographic map, and furnished the updated data.
Between the highest point on Earth and the one on the Moon there are some differences: for starters, Mount Everest is relatively young, because it was formed when tectonic plates collided and pushed up what was once the seafloor, over a period of nearly 60 million years.
The lunar peak is much more ancient, and it might have been formed from ejected matter from the South Pole Aitken basin, over 4 billion years ago.
Another big difference between the two highest points is slope: on Mount Everest it is very abrupt while on the Moon, the slopes have only 3°.
The LRO will continue its mission and maybe solve some of the other unanswered questions about our natural satellite.
LRO is NASA’s way-back-to-the-moon program, and its main objective is to conduct investigations that prepare for future lunar exploration.
