Abstract
The Moon is an archive of impact cratering in the Solar System throughout the past 4.5 billion years. It preserves this record better than larger, more complex planets like the Earth, Mars and Venus, which have largely lost their ancient crusts through geological reprocessing and hydrospheric/atmospheric weathering. Identifying the parent bodies of impactors (i.e. asteroid bodies, comets from the Kuiper belt or the Oort Cloud) provides geochemical and chronological constraints for models of Solar System dynamics, helping to better inform our wider understanding of the evolution of the Solar System and the transfer of small bodies between planets. In this review article, we discuss the evidence for populations of impactors delivered to the Moon at different times in the past. We also propose approaches to the identification and characterisation of meteoritic material on the Moon in the context of future lunar exploration efforts.
Highlights
Impact bombardment is a fundamental and ubiquitous Solar System process, involving the collision of planetary bodies such as asteroids, icy bodies, and other interplanetary debris
We propose approaches to the identification and characterisation of meteoritic material on the Moon in the context of future lunar exploration efforts
As we find meteorite samples from Mars here on Earth (Gladman et al 1996; Meteoritical Bulletin database 2016), impact ejecta from the martian surface could be plausibly found in the lunar regolith (Armstrong et al 2002)
Summary
Impact bombardment is a fundamental and ubiquitous Solar System process, involving the collision of planetary bodies such as asteroids, icy bodies, and other interplanetary debris. A recent set of theories (collectively known as the ‘Nice Model’) invokes the disruption of the main asteroid belt (Minton and Malhotra 2009, 2010) or the Kuiper belt (Koeberl 2003 and references therein; Jørgensen et al 2009), or some combination of the two regions (Tsiganis et al 2005), when outer Solar System gas giant planets entered mean resonance orbits causing them to migrate (Tsiganis et al 2005; Morbidelli et al 2005, 2012; Gomes et al 2005; Bottke et al 2007; Levison et al 2009) Constraining this record on the Moon is vital to understanding Earth’s early history, as the Earth and Moon will have been subjected to bombardment by the same population of impactors. These studies have suggested that all very recent impactors to the Earth-Moon system are associated with small (i.e., a few meters wide) 100 s of g to 10 s of kg mass impactors that produce craters in the 10 s of m diameter size range (Oberst et al 2012; Suggs et al 2014)
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