Related papers: Probing the Moon from Future Asteroid Impacts: A R…
This manuscript analyzes lunar lander soil erosion models and trajectory models to calculate how much damage will occur to spacecraft orbiting in the vicinity of the Moon. The soil erosion models have considerable uncertainty due to gaps in…
The Moon is believed to have formed in the aftermath of a giant impact between a planetary mass body and the proto-Earth. In a typical giant impact scenario, a disk of vapor, liquid, and solid debris forms around the proto-Earth and--after…
Motivated by efforts to return humanity to the Moon, three cases are reviewed for X-ray astronomy from the lunar surface: (1) Facilitation of ambitious engineering designs including high throughput telescopes, long focal length optics and…
This work examines the plausibility of a lunar origin of natural objects that have a negative total energy (ET) with respect to the geocenter while within 3 Earth Hill radii (RH), a population that we will refer to as 'bound'. They are a…
In the giant impact hypothesis for lunar origin, the Moon accreted from an equatorial circum-terrestrial disk; however the current lunar orbital inclination of 5 degrees requires a subsequent dynamical process that is still debated. In…
Pressure is a key parameter in the physics and chemistry of planet formation and evolution. Previous studies have erroneously assumed that internal pressures monotonically increase with the mass of a body. Using smoothed particle…
Exomoons orbiting terrestrial or super-terrestrial exoplanets have not yet been discovered; their possible existence and properties are therefore still an unresolved question. Here we explore the collisional formation of exomoons through…
The object that resulted in the creation of the Moon started in the same orbital path as Earth around the Sun, but at Earth's L4. This proto-Moon (PM) was 4 times less massive than the usual Giant Impact (GI) object "Theia" and was captured…
The formation of the Moon from the debris of a slow and grazing giant impact of a Mars-sized impactor on the proto-Earth (Cameron & Ward 1976, Canup & Asphaug 2001) is widely accepted today. We present an alternative scenario with a…
New insights into the history of the inner solar system are derived from the impact cratering record of the Moon, Mars, Venus and Mercury, and from the size distributions of asteroid populations. Old craters from a unique period of heavy…
We have performed a simulation of a next generation sky survey's (Pan-STARRS 1) efficiency for detecting Earth-impacting asteroids. The steady-state sky-plane distribution of the impactors long before impact is concentrated towards small…
A radio telescope placed in lunar orbit, or on the surface of the Moon's farside, could be of great value to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The advantage of such a telescope is that it would be shielded by the body of…
A large disruption in the main asteroid belt can cause a large flux, an "asteroid shower", on the terrestrial planets. We quantitatively examine the hypothesis that such an event was the cause of the lunar late heavy bombardment (LHB). We…
According to the giant impact theory, the Moon formed by accreting the circum-terrestrial debris disk produced by Theia colliding with the proto-Earth. The giant impact theory can explain most of the properties of the Earth-Moon system,…
There is a growing number of Earth's co-orbital bodies being discovered. At least five of them are known to be temporarily in quasi-satellite orbits. One of those, 469219 Kamo'oalewa, was identified as possibly having the same composition…
In the companion paper ("Erosion rate of lunar soil under a landing rocket, part 1: identifying the rate-limiting physics", this issue) an equation was developed for the rate that lunar soil erodes under the exhaust of a landing rocket.…
The solar system planets are benchmarks for the planet formation theory. Yet two paradigms coexist for the four terrestrial planets: the prolonged collisional growth among planetesimals lasting $>100$ million years (Myr) and the fast…
Earth is constantly being bombarded with material from space. Most of the natural material end up being dust grains that litter the surface of Earth, but larger bodies are known to impact every few decades. The most recent large impact was…
The Earth-Moon system is unusual in several respects. The Moon is roughly 1/4 the radius of the Earth - a larger satellite-to-planet size ratio than all known satellites other than Pluto's Charon. The Moon has a tiny core, perhaps with only…
The flashes from meteoroid impacts on the Moon are useful in determining the flux of impactors with masses as low as a few tens of grams. A routine monitoring program at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center has recorded over 300 impacts…