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Impact craters, as "lunar fossils", are the most dominant lunar surface features and occupy most of the Moon's surface. Their formation and evolution record the history of the Solar System. Sixty years of triumphs in the lunar exploration…
All planets and satellites of our solar system are subject to a continuous rain of material, ranging in size from specks of dust to objects the size of boulders. Upon impact, these objects deposit their kinetic energy into the incident…
Lunar dust particles are generated by hypervelocity impacts of interplanetary micron-meteoroids onto the surface of the Moon, which seriously threatens the security of explorations. Studying the lunar dust dynamics helps to understand the…
Current lunar origin scenarios suggest that Earth's Moon may have resulted from the merger of two (or more) smaller moonlets. Dynamical studies of multiple moons find that these satellite systems are not stable, resulting in moonlet…
We are preparing a telescope system to carry out a survey of detection and analysis of lunar impact flashes. In the framework of this project, here we present all necessary methods to automatically identify these luminous events, their…
Characterised by a surface bound exosphere and localised crustal magnetic fields, the Moon was considered as a passive object when solar wind interacts with it. However, the neutral particle and plasma measurements around the Moon by recent…
Recent lunar crater studies have revealed an asymmetric distribution of rayed craters on the lunar surface. The asymmetry is related to the synchronous rotation of the Moon: there is a higher density of rayed craters on the leading…
A co-orbital asteroid shares the orbit of a secondary body about its primary. Though more commonly encountered as an asteroid that shares a planet's orbit around the Sun, a co-orbital asteroid could similarly share the orbit of the Moon…
The proposed multi-impact model explains the formation of the Moon, Charon, and binary asteroids without invoking catastrophic cosmic events. The main elements of the new model are as follows: a. A primordial, low-mass proto-satellite disk…
The lunar surface has been exposed to the space environment for billions of years and during this time has accumulated records of a wide range of astrophysical phenomena. These include solar wind particles and the cosmogenic products of…
The leading hypothesis for the origin of the Moon, that of a single giant impact, faces significant challenges. These include either the need for an impactor with a near-identical composition to Earth or an extremely high-mass or…
Like many airless planetary surfaces, the surface of the Moon is scattered by populations of blocks and smaller boulders. These features decrease in abundance with increasing exposure time due to comminution by impact bombardment and…
The lunar geological record is expected to contain a rich record of the galactic environment of the Solar System, including records of nearby (i.e. less than a few tens of parsecs) supernova explosions. This record will be composed of two…
The multiple impact hypothesis proposes that the Moon formed through a series of smaller collisions, rather than a single giant impact. This study advances our understanding of this hypothesis, as well as moon collisions in other contexts,…
This paper shows how the exposure of the Moon to the Earth's plasmasheet is subject to decadal variations due to lunar precession. The latter is a key property of the Moon's apparent orbit around the Earth - the nodes of that orbit precess…
Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) measurements are crucial for advanced exploration of the laws of fundamental gravitational physics and geophysics. Current LLR technology allows us to measure distances to the Moon with a precision approaching 1…
Time-limited space missions may miss rare occurrences of very dense clouds of lunar dust. At the same time, the information provided by the Earth-based monitoring of the Moon during at least the last three centuries still remains unused. In…
Accurate estimation of cratering asymmetry on the Moon is crucial for understanding Moon evolution history. Early studies of cratering asymmetry have omitted the contributions of high lunar obliquity and inclination. Here, we include lunar…
The Earth-Moon system is suggested to have formed through a single giant collision, in which the Moon accreted from the impact-generated debris disk. However, such giant impacts are rare, and during its evolution the Earth experienced many…
Lunar impacts have been continuously registered by lunar seismographs from 1969 to 1978, and recently they have been also monitored by a NASA project after several observational campaigns steered by IOTA. Video and naked eye observations,…