Specialists from the University of Arizona have published images transmitted by the LRO spacecraft exploring the Moon. They show the impressive landforms at the bottom of Bruno crater.
Bruno crater is located on the back side of the Moon, near the northeastern edge. Its diameter is 22 km, depth is 1.8 km, and the height of the shaft is 810 m. Despite the fact that there are many much larger craters on the Moon, Bruno crater has gotten a lot of attention from scientists. The matter is that this is one of its youngest impact formations. The Bruno crater has hardly undergone any destruction. A bright ray system stretches from it, the length of which reaches hundreds of kilometers.
LRO images show very unusual landforms at the bottom of the crater. For example, the characteristic curl on the left side of the image below. It was probably formed by a landslide collapsing into a funnel filled with molten rock, causing a circular flow in the funnel. You can also pay attention to the large number of boulders. The largest of them (top right) has a diameter of 130 meters.
The age of Bruno crater has been a long-standing subject of scientific debate, with estimates ranging from 10 million to just a thousand years old. The latter figure is based on a record left in 1178 by monks from Canterbury Abbey observing a strange “splitting” of the lunar disk just in the part where the crater is located.
However, most scientists believe that these events are unrelated. The most likely age of the crater is about a million years. The modeling results also show that the Asteroid Kamo’oalewa, which is a quasi-satellite of Earth, is very likely debris dislodged during the formation of Bruno crater.
In 2025, China is going to launch the Tianwen-2 mission, which will target Kamo’oalewa. The spacecraft will study the asteroid before taking and delivering a sample of its soil to Earth. If Kamo’oalewa is truly related to Bruno, its analysis will allow us to determine the age of the crater.
According to LROC
