Lunokhod Moon Photos 2


Although the provisional designation of 2005 FY9 was given to Makemake when its discovery was made public, before that Dr. Brown's team had used the playful codename "Easter Bunny" for this small world, because of its discovery shortly after Easter. Earth's Moon is the largest and brightest object suspended in the darkness of the starry night sky. It is both lovely and enchanting, and it has, since ancient times, inspired curiosity and wonder in human beings who gaze up at the mysterious sky after the Sun has set. As such, Earth's Moon has long served as the inspiration for imaginative, wild and marvelous tales--it is the stuff of mythology and folklore. The "Man in the Moon" refers to several fantastic images of a human face that certain traditions see outlined in the gleaming disk of the full Moon. In November 2013, astronomers using data from the lunar-orbiting twins composing NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, announced that they have been acquiring new and fascinating insight into how this bewitching "face," etched on our Moon's disk, received its captivating and enchanting good looks! GRAIL has also generated new maps showing lunar crustal thickness. These maps have managed to uncover still more large impact basins on the near-side hemisphere of Earth's Moon--revealing that there are fewer such basins on the far-side, which is the side that is always turned away from Earth. This observation begs the question: How could this be if both hemispheres were on the receiving end of the same number of crashing, impacting, crater-excavating projectiles? According to GRAIL data, the answer to this riddle is that most of the volcanic eruptions on Earth's Moon occurred on its near-side hemisphere.