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GRAIL Reveals the Moon's Gravity - Moon's Gravity Field is 'unlike any other terrestrial planet in Solar System'
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:moonsgravity:
Twin NASA probes orbiting Earth's moon have generated the highest resolution gravity field map of any celestial body. The new map, created by the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, is allowing scientists to learn about the moon's internal structure and composition in unprecedented detail...
...Data also show the moon's gravity field is unlike that of any terrestrial planet in our solar system. These are the first scientific results from the prime phase of the mission, and they are published in three papers in the journal Science.
"What this map tells us is that more than any other celestial body we know of, the moon wears its gravity field on its sleeve," said GRAIL Principal Investigator Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "When we see a notable change in the gravity field, we can sync up this change with surface topography features such as craters, rilles or mountains."...
..."With our new crustal bulk density determination, we find that the average thickness of the moon's crust is between 21 and 27 miles (34 and 43 kilometers), which is about 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 kilometers) thinner than previously thought," said Mark Wieczorek, GRAIL co-investigator at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris.
[link to www.space-travel.com]
[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]
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