• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

“Grand Canyons” On The Moon Were Carved Out In Ten Catastrophic Minutes

February 4, 2025 by Deborah Bloomfield

Two giant canyons on the Moon were created in less than ten minutes, according to a new study analyzing clues about their formation. The findings could impact NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions to the far side of the Moon.

ADVERTISEMENT GO AD FREE

The Schrödinger Impact Basin, named for noted quantum physicist and hypothetical cat murderer Erwin Schrödinger, is an impressively big crater located within the larger South Pole-Aitken basin on the far side of the Moon. As one of the youngest basins that we know of, it is well-preserved, making it a tempting target for anyone wishing to learn about basin formation processes.

In the new study, David Kring, Danielle Kallenborn, and Gareth Collins attempted to do just this, and explain the giant canyons that surround the ~320-kilometer (~199-mile) in diameter basin. The canyons studied, Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck, are comparable to the Earth’s Grand Canyon in size. Vallis Schrödinger is ~270 kilometers (~168 miles) long, and ~2.7 kilometers (~1.7 miles) deep, whereas Vallis Planck is ~280 kilometers (~174 miles) long and ~3.5 kilometers (~2.2 miles) deep. 

How these canyons formed has been uncertain. In the study, the team looked at photographs taken of the Moon’s far side and created maps to help them calculate the trajectory of debris ejected during the impact event that formed the basin. Modeling the impact, they noted key differences in the formation of the Grand Canyon and the canyons on the Moon.

“Whereas Arizona’s Grand Canyon was carved by water over the last 5 to 6 million years and from integrated paleocanyons that formed over 70 million years, the Moon’s Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck were carved by streams of impacting rock in less than 10 min,” the team wrote in their study.

According to the analysis, the canyons were formed in about the time it takes to microwave a frozen lasagna, in an impact that sent debris flying at between 0.95 kilometers per second (0.59 miles per second) and 1.28 kilometers per second (0.8 miles per second). While pinning down the exact energy involved is tricky, the impact was certainly a big one.



ADVERTISEMENT GO AD FREE

“The energy to produce the grand canyons on the Moon are 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 team explained.

While you may file this under “cool to know”, NASA may want to take a closer look at the results. According to the team, it could have several implications for the upcoming crewed Artemis mission.

“The asymmetric ejecta distribution implied by Schrödinger’s crater rays suggests there is less Schrödinger impact ejecta covering candidate landing sites and, thus, astronauts and robotic assets will find it easier to sample SPA [South Pole-Aitken] and underlying primordial crust samples.”

As well as this, the team suggests that aging samples from the basin could test the “lunar impact cataclysm hypothesis”, which suggests the Moon underwent an “enhanced period” of bombardment around 3.8 billion years ago, among other ideas.

ADVERTISEMENT GO AD FREE

“Where craters puncture the SPA ejecta blanket, they can expose primordial crust. Excavated SPA material and any primordial crust can be used to test the lunar magma ocean hypothesis for planetary differentiation and the giant impact hypothesis for the origin of the Earth-Moon system, among many other objectives,” they explain. “Because the Schrödinger impact event dispersed the bulk of its ejecta away from Artemis candidate landing sites, those objectives are more likely to be met.”

The study is published in Nature Communications.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Skype alumni head to court in a battle over Starship Technologies and Wire
  2. The Most Common Passwords Of 2023 Are Ridiculous, Hilarious, And Worrying
  3. The Famous “March Of Progress” Image Is Wildly Wrong
  4. Foxes And Wildcats Were Often On The Menu 10,000 Years Ago

Source Link: "Grand Canyons" On The Moon Were Carved Out In Ten Catastrophic Minutes

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Scientists Perplexed By 407-Million-Year-Old Fossilized Plant That Doesn’t Follow The Fibonacci Sequence
  • This Giant Goldfish Hybrid Weighs As Much As A 10-Year-Old – A Stark Warning About Dumping Pets
  • Scientists Gave Mice Neanderthal And Denisovan Genes. The Results Were Intriguing
  • 2024 Saw Higher Levels Of Carbon Dioxide In The Atmosphere Than Ever Before
  • Halloween Fireballs Will Grace Our Skies As The Taurid Meteor Showers Arrive
  • Newly Discovered Hunting Megastructures Suggest Pre-Bronze Age Societies More Sophisticated Than Previously Thought
  • What Is Spectroscopy And Why Is It So Important To Science?
  • Parkinson’s “Trigger” Seen For The First Time: Scientists Image The Toxic Molecules Inside The Human Brain
  • What Flying Animals Exist That Are Not Birds?
  • DNA Evidence Uncovers Surprising Origins Of Native Americans
  • Single Gene Swap “Transfers A Behavior” Between Two Species For The First Time
  • Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Has A Rare “Anti-Tail”, New Observations Confirm
  • Asteroid Apophis: Animation Shows Asteroid’s Nail-Biting Close Approach To Earth In 2029
  • Titan Breaks A Key Chemistry Rule: What That Means For Alien Life
  • Scientists Studied “Chicago Rat Hole” – They Have Bad News, The South Atlantic’s Magnetic Field Weak Spot Is Growing, And Much More This Week
  • Could This Be The Real Reason Humans Survived And Neanderthals Died Out?
  • Newly Discovered Snail Species Named After Studio Ghibli Co-Founder Is A Hairy Beauty
  • 2025 SC79 Is The Second-Fastest Asteroid Ever Found – And Only The Second Within Venus’ Orbit
  • When Red Devil Spiders Arrived On A New Island, Their Genome Dramatically Shrank In Half
  • Is This The World’s Oldest Story? Ancient Human Tale About The Seven Sisters May Be From 100,000 BCE
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version