[X] My Assistant

[Guest_Zvezdichko_*]

I know it may be too early for such a thread, but an announcement has to be made.

The official website of the LROC camera is:

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/

A brief description plus status is available here:

http://www.msss.com/lro/lroc/index.html

[Guest_Zvezdichko_*]

Yes! This sample is just another example of rock movement.

Because this is what I think has happened while looking at these images.

We can clearly seen the trails. But what could have caused this? The Moon is a dead body for millions of years.

[James Fincannon]

Yes! This sample is just another example of rock movement.

Because this is what I think has happened while looking at these images.

We can clearly seen the trails. But what could have caused this? The Moon is a dead body for millions of years.

Back in the old Lunar Orbiter days they developed alot of theories for why the boulders eventually rolled downhill. I will have to did up the old reports. I recall thermal cycling and impacts of meteors causing tremors factored into it.

My main interest in these is that they permit the deduction of regolith mechanical properties without having to land there. We don't really have any instruments to deduce these mechanical properties remotely. Landers or rovers could of course, but that is way too costly. During the Lunar Orbiter days, they found a slew of these in the very high resolution images (~1-3m/pixel, which only covered a small percentage of the surface) and derived regolith properties in preparation for Apollo landings.

One of the concerns about the regolith is how much variation there is in its properties over the entire surface. Since interest exists for the near polar regions, it would be nice to be assured the properties are the same there as near the equator. Rolling boulders should be distributed fairly equally over the surface and if there aren't many near the poles, that is significant.

Also, looking at these images, I had supposed there would be many more rocks and boulders (which would be especially visible at some of the shallow Sun elevations for the images), but there seems to be many more craters than boulders (~an order of magnitude). Does this make sense?