Post by Valentin Bickel, PhD student, Department of Earth Sciences, ETH Zurich, CH & Department Planets and Comets, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, GER.
One of the most intriguing objects on the surface of the Moon are the “rolling stones”, also known as lunar rockfalls or rolling boulders (Image 1). These boulders are abundant all over the Moon and have sizes that range from a couple of meters to several 10s of meters. Lunar boulders are believed to be displaced by moonquakes or impacts and can carve tracks with lengths that range from a couple of meters to several kilometers (Image 1; Xiao et al., 2013; Kumar et al., 2016). Besides their value for geomorphological analyses, these boulder tracks provide insights into the mechanical behavior and the trafficability of the lunar “soil”, the regolith (Bickel et al., 2019).
Image 1: A number of large and small boulders with tracks at the bottom of a lunar slope. The analysis of tracks provides insights about the mechanical properties of the regolith and is performed using high-resolution satellite imagery, taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Narrow Angle Camera (NAC). Detail of NAC Image M113934119LC.
Planetary Geomorphology Image of the Month 