image: Free-air gravitational anomalies and shaded topographic relief of the Moon's 930-km-diameter Orientale impact basin. Red corresponds to mass excesses and blue to mass deficits relative to a reference value. This gravitational field model, based on measurements acquired from the NASA GRAIL mission, shows the detailed structure of the central basin depression that is filled with dense mare basalts, as well as the rings that formed due to gravitational collapse of the initial crater cavity shortly after the impact. The shaded relief map, from a digital elevation model from the laser altimeter on the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the SELENE Terrain Camera, is rendered with the virtual sun just after sunrise at Orientale, a day after the full Moon. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the Oct. 28, 2016, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by B.C. Johnson at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, and colleagues was titled, 'Formation of the Orientale lunar multiring basin.' view more
Credit: Ernest Wright, NASA/GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio