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Nicholson (lunar Crater)
Nicholson is a lunar impact crater located at the western limb. In this position it is subject to libration, which can limit observation. The crater is also viewed at a very oblique angle, so it is seen from the side when observed from the Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to Planetary habitability, harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all .... It is an irregular, somewhat pear-shaped formation that has an uneven rim due to its location amidst rugged ground. The rim is sharp-edged and the inner wall varies in thickness, being narrower along the northern side and wider at the southern end. The interior floor is rough, small and uneven, with no impacts of significance. There is a small central ridge. Nicholson is located in the Montes Rook, a ring-shaped mountain formation that encircles the immense Mare Orientale feature. It lie ...
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Lunar Orbiter 4
Lunar Orbiter 4 was a robotic U.S. spacecraft, part of the Lunar Orbiter program, Lunar Orbiter Program, designed to orbit the Moon, after the three previous orbiters had completed the required needs for Project Apollo, Apollo mapping and site selection. It was given a more general objective, to "perform a broad systematic photographic survey of lunar surface features in order to increase the scientific knowledge of their nature, origin, and processes, and to serve as a basis for selecting sites for more detailed scientific study by subsequent orbital and landing missions". It was also equipped to collect selenodetic, radiation intensity, and micrometeoroid impact data. Mission summary The spacecraft was placed in a Free-return trajectory, cislunar trajectory and injected into an elliptical near polar high lunar orbit for data acquisition. The orbit was with an inclination of 85.5 degrees and a period of 12 hours. After initial photography on May 11, 1967 problems started ...
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Seth Barnes Nicholson
Seth Barnes Nicholson (November 12, 1891 – July 2, 1963) was an American astronomer. He worked at the Lick observatory in California, and is known for discovering several moons of Jupiter in the 20th century. Nicholson was born in Springfield, Illinois, and was raised in rural Illinois. He was educated at Drake University, where he became interested in astronomy. On May 29, 1913, he was married to Alma Stotts, a fellow student at Drake then the University of California at Berkeley. They would have three children: Margaret, Donald, and Jean. In 1914, at the University of California's Lick Observatory, while observing the recently discovered Jupiter moon Pasiphaë, he discovered a new one, Sinope, whose orbit he computed for his Ph.D. thesis in 1915. He spent his entire career at Mount Wilson Observatory, where he discovered three more Jovian moons: Lysithea and Carme in 1938, and Ananke in 1951. While at the Palomar Observatory in 1957, he discovered 1647 Menelaus, an ast ...
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Lunar Craters
Lunar craters are impact craters on Earth's Moon. The Moon's surface has many craters, all of which were formed by impacts. The International Astronomical Union currently recognizes 9,137 craters, of which 1,675 have been dated. History The word ''crater'' was adopted from the Greek language, Greek word for "vessel" (, a Greek vessel used to mix wine and water). Galileo built his refracting telescope, first telescope in late 1609, and turned it to the Moon for the first time on November 30, 1609. He discovered that, contrary to general opinion at that time, the Moon was not a perfect sphere, but had both mountains and cup-like depressions. These were named craters by Johann Hieronymus Schröter (1791), extending its previous use with volcanoes. Robert Hooke in ''Micrographia'' (1665) proposed two hypotheses for lunar crater formation: one, that the craters were caused by projectile bombardment from space, the other, that they were the products of subterranean lunar volcanism. ...
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Impact Crater
An impact crater is a depression (geology), depression in the surface of a solid astronomical body formed by the hypervelocity impact event, impact of a smaller object. In contrast to volcanic craters, which result from explosion or internal collapse, impact craters typically have raised rims and floors that are lower in elevation than the surrounding terrain. Impact craters are typically circular, though they can be elliptical in shape or even irregular due to events such as landslides. Impact craters range in size from microscopic craters seen on lunar rocks returned by the Apollo Program to simple bowl-shaped depressions and vast, complex, multi-ringed impact basins. Meteor Crater is a well-known example of a small impact crater on Earth. Impact craters are the dominant geographic features on many solid Solar System objects including the Moon, Mercury (planet), Mercury, Callisto (moon), Callisto, Ganymede (moon), Ganymede, and most small moons and asteroids. On other planet ...
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Libration
In lunar astronomy, libration is the cyclic variation in the apparent position of the Moon that is perceived by observers on the Earth and caused by changes between the orbital and rotational planes of the moon. It causes an observer to see slightly different hemispheres of the surface at different times. It is similar in both cause and effect to the changes in the Moon's apparent size because of changes in lunar distance (astronomy), distance. It is caused by three mechanisms detailed below, two of which cause a relatively tiny physical libration via tidal forces exerted by the Earth. Such true librations are known as well for other moons with locked rotation. The quite different phenomenon of a trojan asteroid's movement has been called ''Trojan libration'', and ''Trojan libration point'' means Lagrangian point. Lunar libration The Moon keeps one wikt:hemisphere, hemisphere of itself facing the Earth because of tidal locking. Therefore, the first view of the far side of ...
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Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to Planetary habitability, harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all of Earth's water is contained in its global ocean, covering Water distribution on Earth, 70.8% of Earth's crust. The remaining 29.2% of Earth's crust is land, most of which is located in the form of continental landmasses within Earth's land hemisphere. Most of Earth's land is at least somewhat humid and covered by vegetation, while large Ice sheet, sheets of ice at Polar regions of Earth, Earth's polar polar desert, deserts retain more water than Earth's groundwater, lakes, rivers, and Water vapor#In Earth's atmosphere, atmospheric water combined. Earth's crust consists of slowly moving tectonic plates, which interact to produce mountain ranges, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Earth's outer core, Earth has a liquid outer core that generates a ...
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Montes Rook
Montes Rook is a ring-shaped mountain range that lies along the western limb of the Moon, crossing over to the far side. It completely encircles the Mare Orientale, and forms part of a massive impact basin feature. This range in turn is encircled by the larger Montes Cordillera, which is separated from the Montes Rook by a rugged, ring-shaped plain. The Montes Rook is actually a double-ring formation, sometimes divided into the outer Rook and the inner Rook, having respective diameters of 620 km and 480 km. The material excavated to form Montes Rook came from a mafic layer below an anorthositic zone. Many of the peaks in this ring are composed of pure anorthosite. Sections of the gap between these sub-ranges contain long valleys filled in places with basaltic lava, forming small lunar maria. One such section along the northeastern part of the range has been named Lacus Veris. The selenographic coordinates of this range are 20.6° S, 82.5° W, and the diameter is 791&n ...
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Mare Orientale
Mare Orientale (Latin ''orientāle'', the "eastern sea") is a lunar mare. It is located on the western border of the near side and far side of the Moon, and is difficult to see from an Earthbound perspective. Images from spacecraft have revealed it to be one of the most striking large scale lunar features, resembling a target ring bullseye. Geology During the 1960s, rectified images of Mare Orientale by Gerard Kuiper at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory gave rise to the notion of it being an impact crater. The structure, with the flat plain of the mare in the center, is about across and was formed by the impact of an asteroid-sized object, possibly in diameter and travelling at . Compared with most other lunar basins, Mare Orientale is less flooded by mare basalts, so that much of the basin structure is visible. The basalt in the central portion of the Orientale basin is probably less than in thickness which is much less than mare basins on the Earth-facing side of the M ...
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Pettit (lunar Crater)
Pettit is a Lunar craters, lunar impact crater that lies near the western limb of the Moon. It was named after American astronomer Edison Pettit. In this location the crater is viewed nearly from the side by observers on Earth, and visibility can be significantly affected by libration effects. The crater lies among the rugged features of the Montes Rook, the inner ring of mountains that surround the Mare Orientale impact basin. It is nearly a twin of the crater Nicholson (lunar crater), Nicholson which lies less than one crater diameter to the northeast. Another similar formation is Wright (lunar crater), Wright almost due south. The rim of this crater has something of the appearance of a rounded hexagon, with slightly flattened rims to the east and west. The rim is sharp-edged, and the inner wall material has slumped down to lie in a pile around the base. The interior floor is a rugged jumble, with a small central peak and hills to the north and west. Beyond the rim lies rugged ...
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NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States's civil list of government space agencies, space program, aeronautics research and outer space, space research. National Aeronautics and Space Act, Established in 1958, it succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to give the American space development effort a distinct civilian orientation, emphasizing peaceful applications in space science. It has since led most of America's space exploration programs, including Project Mercury, Project Gemini, the 1968–1972 Apollo program missions, the Skylab space station, and the Space Shuttle. Currently, NASA supports the International Space Station (ISS) along with the Commercial Crew Program and oversees the development of the Orion (spacecraft), Orion spacecraft and the Sp ...
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United States Geological Survey
The United States Geological Survey (USGS), founded as the Geological Survey, is an agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior whose work spans the disciplines of biology, geography, geology, and hydrology. The agency was founded on March 3, 1879, to study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, and the natural hazards that threaten it. The agency also makes maps of planets and moons, based on data from U.S. space probes. The sole scientific agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior, USGS is a fact-finding research organization with no regulatory responsibility. It is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, with major offices near Lakewood, Colorado; at the Denver Federal Center; and in NASA Research Park in California. In 2009, it employed about 8,670 people. The current motto of the USGS, in use since August 1997, is "science for a changing world". The agency's previous slogan, adopted on its hundredth anniversary, was "Earth Science in the Pub ...
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Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessment to form Cambridge University Press and Assessment under Queen Elizabeth II's approval in August 2021. With a global sales presence, publishing hubs, and offices in more than 40 countries, it published over 50,000 titles by authors from over 100 countries. Its publications include more than 420 academic journals, monographs, reference works, school and university textbooks, and English language teaching and learning publications. It also published Bibles, runs a bookshop in Cambridge, sells through Amazon, and has a conference venues business in Cambridge at the Pitt Building and the Sir Geoffrey Cass Sports and Social Centre. It also served as the King's Printer. Cambridge University Press, as part of the University of Cambridge, was a ...
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