Evidence of large empty lava tubes on the Moon using GRAIL gravity
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Author(s)
Chappaz, Loic
Sood, Rohan
Howell, Kathleen C.
Milbury, Colleen
Melosh IV, Henry Jay
Blair, David M.
Zuber, Maria
Date Issued
January 2017
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Citation
Chappaz, Loic, Rohan Sood, Henry J. Melosh, Kathleen C. Howell, David M. Blair, Colleen Milbury, and Maria T. Zuber. “Evidence of Large Empty Lava Tubes on the Moon Using GRAIL Gravity.” Geophysical Research Letters 44, no. 1 (January 13, 2017): 105–112.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
NASA's GRAIL mission employed twin spacecraft in polar orbits around the Moon to measure the lunar gravity field at unprecedentedly high accuracy and resolution. The low spacecraft altitude in the extended mission enables the detection of small-scale surface or subsurface features. We analyzed these data for evidence of empty lava tubes beneath the lunar maria. We developed two methods, gradiometry and cross correlation, to isolate the target signal of long, narrow, sinuous mass deficits from a host of other features present in the GRAIL data. Here we report the discovery of several strong candidates that are either extensions of known lunar rilles, collocated with the recently discovered “skylight” caverns, or underlying otherwise unremarkable surfaces. Owing to the spacecraft polar orbits, our techniques are most sensitive to east-west trending near-surface structures and empty lava tubes with minimum widths of several kilometers, heights of hundreds of meters, and lengths of tens of kilometers.
MIT Department
Haystack Observatory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL071588
