Showing posts with label Europa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Europa. Show all posts

Monday, February 23, 2009

Moon Mantle Is Rigid



The lunar surface has been mapped and it's crust and mantle are solid and rigid with no liquid beneath the surface.

To me this is another piece of evidence that suggests there is no water inside Europa and therefore the moons are growing: Most Detailed Lunar Map Suggests Little Water Inside Moon.

In part, the new map will serve as a guide for future lunar rovers, which will scour the surface for geological resources.

But Araki and his colleagues did something more with the map: they measured the roughness of the lunar surface, and used that information to calculate the stiffness of the crust.

If water flowed beneath the lunar surface, the crust would be somewhat flexible, but it wasn't. The surface was too rigid to allow for any liquid water, even deep within the Moon.

Earth's surface is more flexible, by contrast, with the surface rising or falling as water flows above or below ground. Even our planet's [alleged] plate tectonics is due in part to water lubricating the crust.

And Mars? On a scale of surface roughness, it falls somewhere between the Earth and the Moon, which indicates that there may have once been liquid water, but that the surface is now very dry.

No surprise there.

But Mars' roughness coupled with the complete absence of plate tectonics suggests that if there is water in the red planet's interior, it is not located near the surface, where it could lubricate the crust, Shum explained.

The LALT map is the most detailed lunar map ever created.