Lunar basins – the Moon’s big bangs

In the first 500 million years or so of the Moon’s history dozens of large impacts formed large, deep basins on the Moon, shaping the surface that we know today. All the Apollo landing sites were in some way influenced by the formation of these basins. The largest and oldest of them all, the South Pole–Aitken Basin, lies on the far side of the Moon, barely noticeable from Earth, but it is of particular interest as it may have significantly affected the entire history of the Moon. This talk will discuss how these basins shaped the Moon and what it implies for the early history of the Earth and the beginning of life on our home planet.

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About Noah Petro

Noah Petro is a research geoscientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where he focuses on the geology of the Moon and small bodies in the Solar System. He earned his PhD from Brown University in 2007 and started at Goddard later that year as a post-doctoral student. He has worked with the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, a US-built spectrometer that orbited the Moon on India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Noah currently works on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA mission orbiting the Moon that has sent back astoundingly detailed images of the Apollo landing sites. Noah’s research has focused on understanding how craters large and small contribute to the evolution of the surfaces of planets and small bodies.

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