Very interesting: "The area also coincides with a strong magnetic anomaly."
Should we go to check if a monolith wait for us?

Very cool. What's the little dark spot in the bottom right corner that moves "up" during the animation?

That's the UFO taking off from the secret underground landing facility, of course. Richard Hoagland will tell you all about it, once he gets back from his weekend in the 6th dimension.

The ESA web page mentions that, apart from Reiner Gamma, there are two other anomalous swirl features on the Moon. I only knew of RG - anyone know which the others are?





Bruce:

No! No! You'll bring them here!

Quick, read this sign!

Bob Shaw

The other two swirl areas are more distributed arrangements of smaller bright swirls, lacking a single feature as large and contrasty as Reiner Gamma itself. Also they are not in such open mare areas, so less visible against a rougher background.

One is in the Mare Marginis area roughly antipodal to Orientale. The second is in the Mare Ingenii area on the far side, roughly antipodal to the Imbrium basin.

The antipodal arrangement is possibly related to their origin. One suggested mechanism is as follows: a large impact creates a large ejecta plume which spreads out in all directions. Eventually it closes on itself around the antipodal point. The ejecta thus is somewhat concentrated at the antipodal point. That ejecta traps the magnetic field associated with the solar wind (or maybe the contemporary lunar field) causing a magnetic anomaly. The swirls are associated with both the ejecta and the magnetic anomaly. I don't pretend to understand the mechanism in detail.

The spot is a flaw in the CCD (or similar artifact). It's really at the same pixel location in every image.

Phil

Phil:

Thanks for that. Any idea whether there have been searches at other - eg farside - antipodes to big impacts?

Bob Shaw

Won't work any more, Bob. Had you continued to read the comics, you'd know that Mxy dropped that rule back around 1988 -- now he leaves when he damn well feels like it, and not before. (Even he has some limits, though, so I'll refrain from my initial plan to repeat H******d's name three more times in this message.)

Bob, regarding other possible antipodal swirls: I'm sure they have been searched for, but the pre-Clementine images would have been limited in quality and I'm not up to date with what's been done with Clementine. If they really are associated with ejecta, older swirls associated with some other basins would likely have been destroyed by later impacts. For instance, putative Crisium swirls would be destroyed by the Orientale impact.

Also, if this is the explanation, what produced Reiner Gamma? Still not at all clear.

Phil

Reiner Gamma swirl: magnetic effect of a cometary impact?

This animation, made from images taken by the Advanced Moon Imaging Experiment
(AMIE) on board ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft, shows a feature characterized by
bright albedo, and called Reiner Gamma Formation.

Read more:

http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEM05FNFGLE_index_0.html

Interesting ljk-4 article.

So, the Reiner Gamma Formation could be an interesting site for future human exploration because of the radiation deflected from the surface. Further testing of this hypothesis requires access to the physical properties of the surface to constrain the mechanisms of formation of the lunar swirls. This is an ongoing task for the AMIE camera, aimed at studying regolith photometric properties.

This will lead as a possiblity place to set up a moon base since that zone might have deflaction properties of solar radiation. What else can be explained of the bright spots of Moon surface since Moon has no aeolian force to clean the dirty surface and the only possibility is of the magnetic field. This means that the sun radiation is getting dirtier to moon surface....So this must be a interesting hypothesis and it is worth to be confirmed.

Rodolfo

Rodolfo:

I don't think there's any evidence for current deflection of debris or interference with radiation etc - what we see is a snapshot in time.

Bob Shaw

I have enclosed an article from: http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/re...irl.html?742006

So, it was suggested that the Reiner Gamma swirls correspond to magnetised materials in the crust or iron-rich ejecta materials able to deflect the solar wind (constant flow of charged particles coming from the Sun). This would prevent surface materials to undergo maturation processes, and so produce an optical anomaly.

So, the Reiner Gamma Formation could be an interesting site for future human exploration because of the radiation deflected from the surface. Further testing of this hypothesis requires access to the physical properties of the surface to constrain the mechanisms of formation of the lunar swirls. This is an ongoing task for the AMIE camera, aimed at studying regolith photometric properties.

However, this case is still an hypothesis, it might be of others factors such as :

Then, the magnetic anomaly would not be the result of an antipodal crustal field generated in the formation process of large impact basins. It would rather arise from local effects during the interaction between the lunar surface and cometary physical environment, with the possibility that the solar wind is locally deflected and contributes to the unusual optical properties.


Phil, do you think that these sites are worth to be explored by any surface robot? What kind of scientific instrument is needed to confirm that hypothesis? An magnetometer?

Rodolfo

Magnetic mapping from orbit is never at very high resolution. It would be scientifically useful to run surface traverses across Reiner Gamma with a magnetometer - on a robotic or crewed rover.

Phil

Latest image posted...http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/smart_...um_comp_new.jpg

That brings the total images from SMART-1 of the moon on the official site to 16. Woo hoo.

Is there a better site with more SMART-1 images than the official site? I googled for about 1/2 hour but didn't find another site with more images.

Any ideas on the total number of images taken by SMART-1?

Not to mention the poor images quality...