Sun with Planet Mars


The moon is a reflection of the spiritual and emotional forces within us. Always shifting, always changing, it reveals who we are and what we are looking for-especially in the realm of love and romance! In fact, understanding our relationship to the moon is a powerful way to bring us closer to the love relationships we seek. 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. Comets are really traveling relic icy planetesimals, the remnants of what was once a vast population of ancient objects that contributed to the construction of the quartet of giant, gaseous planets of the outer Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Alternatively, the asteroids--that primarily inhabit the region between Mars and Jupiter termed the Main Asteroid Belt--are the leftover rocky and metallic planetesimals that bumped into one another and then merged together to form the four rocky and metallic inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Planetesimals of both the rocky and icy kind blasted into one another in the cosmic "shooting gallery" that was our young Solar System. These colliding objects also merged together to create ever larger and larger bodies--from pebble size, to boulder size, to mountain size--and, finally, to planet size.