See that big rock there? (It’s easy because there’s a big yellow arrow pointing to it.) That’s a 100-foot/30-meter wide boulder that was imaged sitting on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by ESA’s Rosetta on May 2, 2015. Nine months later Rosetta captured another image of the same area in which that huge stone had…
Tag: boulder
NASA Satellite Spots Creepy Face on the Moon
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) acquired an image of the interior of Schiller crater on the Moon and this grumpy-looking boulder was found within by a Moon Zoo member. Just what is it, and what could have created it? Read more here!
Bounce and Flow
Dark flows run down the slopes of Stevinus A crater on the Moon in this detail of an image from the LRO’s camera. Large boulders that have rolled downhill appear to have interrupted the flow in at least one spot in this image. It’s still not exactly known whether these features in Stevinus A are…
From the LITD Archives: Sinking the Shot
Alan Shepard may have played some moon golf during his visit in 1971 but even he wouldn’t have been up to par with this course. 😉 This photo shows the trail of a house-sized (33-foot-wide) lunar boulder that has rolled downhill and come to rest inside the rim of a crater. The image was taken…
It’s All Downhill
This image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a close-up of an 80-foot-wide boulder on the central peak of Gassendi Crater, a trail left behind it in the dark lunar soil. There’s even a bit of a pile-up of soil in front of it where it came to rest! Several smaller boulders on either side…
Like a Rolling Stone
A boulder leaves a bounding trail in the lunar dust Here’s a neat image for today: a detail of the central peak of Eratosthenes Crater, taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), shows a trail a rolling boulder has left in the regolith (the fancy word for Moon dirt.) The boulder, located in the…
Sinking the Shot
Alan Shepard may have played some moon golf during his visit in 1971 but even he wouldn’t have been up to par with this course. 😉 This photo shows the trail of a house-sized (33-foot-wide) lunar boulder that has rolled downhill and come to rest inside the rim of a crater. The image was taken…
Follow the Dotted Line
A dotted line marks the path of a large boulder that has bounced down the inner slope of this 1-km-wide crater in this image from the HiRISE camera, taken on November 12, 2006. The boulder can be seen where it came to rest among the sand dunes on the crater’s floor. See the original release…
Rolling Stones
This closeup of a mapping image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the rolling, bouncing trails left by lunar boulders as they travelled down the slopes of Tsiolkovskiy Crater’s central peak. These boulders, several meters across, lost their footing in the dusty lunar soil at some point and rolled downhill to where they lay now….
Lights in the Dark 