"South Pole- Aitken " Basin on the First Images of the Lunar Far-side

• Main Authors: V. I. Chikmachev, V. V. Shevchenko, Sternberg State, Universitetskii Pr
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aitken; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.505.1846; http://selena.sai.msu.ru/Symposium/South Pole.pdf

As the completion of a global topographic survey of the surface of Solar Sys-tem bodies has shown, the ring structure adjacent to the southern region of the Moon is the largest crater of the Solar System in terms of absolute size- 2500 km in diame-ter with an average depth of 12 km (Spudis et al., 1994). The relative size of this structure is so large that, if the traditional point of view on the process of impact cratering is adopted, the cavity originally formed in this giant structure could uncover materials to the depth of the lunar mantle (Head et al.,1993). Even only these circumstances show that studying this multiring structure, which does not yet have an approved name (but is tentatively called the South Pole-Aitken basin), is of fundamental importance. Since the diameter of the ring structure observed at present reaches 1.4 times the radius of the Moon, the reconstruction of this impact- structure formation mechanism is undoubtedly a topical problem in the investigation of the evolution of planetary surfaces. It is obvious that detailed infor-mation on the South Pole- Aitken basin topography is necessary for developing real-