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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Lunar Exploration _ Vaughan crater - New name to the lunar nomenclature

Posted by: John Moore Oct 17 2019, 08:46 PM

Located on the farside of the Moon at Lat 41.41S, Long 171.85W (3.0 km in diameter), crater 'Vaughan' is a well deserved addition to the lunar nomenclature (so few named features by the IAU these days)...as viewed by LROC.

Top image, is an overhead view, middle image is a more 3d view looking westwards, and the bottom image show details subsequently lost in shadows.

Geological features: Impact melt on its north-western walls; impact-melt cracks on its western floor sector; boulders strewn on its outer rim; bright-ray material all around from the initial, central impact point.

A young-ish crater...by lunar geological standards. Use this http://bit.ly/32rTsPJ to zoom in or out for details.

As light reflection from crater walls can sometimes show up details in dark-shadowed regions, the last image below does so (think of the Earthshine effect).

John Moore

Posted by: Phil Stooke Oct 18 2019, 07:46 PM

An interesting thing about this little crater is where it is located: near the Chang'e 4 site on the far side. In fact it is very close to the point suggested by the late, great, Paul Spudis in this article:

https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/chinas-journey-lunar-far-side-missed-opportunity-180963703/

Paul suggested there that Yutu 2 would have a better chance to study South Pole-Aitken materials if it landed outside Von Karman, and suggested a place east of Finsen crater. It turns out that Finsen threw its ejecta over the floor of Von Karman and Yutu 2 is currently studying it.

Look at the map Paul provides (bottom of the article) - Vaughan crater is just above the 'l' in 'landing site' in his yellow text label on that illustration.

On a related note, the Nomenclature working group also recently named a little crater near Theophilus on the near side - it is the target for SLIM, a Japanese small lander.