New evidence has shown how asteroids slamming into the Moon have changed the positions of its poles.
impacts have caused the Moon's body to 'wander', rolling it by around 10 degrees in relation to its rotational axis. This is a relatively small shift, which means any ice tucked away in craters at the lunar poles is unlikely to have been significantly affected. In turn, this means that future lunar exploration can continue accordingly.
So, each time a chunk of space rock slams into the lunar surface, it alters the lunar gravitational profile, even if just by a little bit. Cumulatively, over a very long time, this can alter the way an object moves and orients itself in space. So that is what the team set out to do, looking to erase craters wider than 20 kilometers across. They identified nearly 5,200 craters and basins, mapping them to the gravitational data from GRAIL and then working backwards in time to erase them.
The effect of each individual crater was miniscule. But there were a lot of them, and with each subtraction the lunar poles crept back towards the position they were in billions of years ago. All together, the gravitational effect of all these small craters was almost equal to that of the South Pole-Aitken Basin, a colossal impact zone around 2,500 kilometers across, nearly aThis plot shows the lunar wander over time, overlaid onto the current lunar topology.
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