Abstract
The history of the accretion of extraterrestrial material onto the Earth covers the entire lifetime of the planet, from the accretion of great quantities of mass at the time the planet formed ∼4.5 Ga, to the much less dramatic infall of stones and dust to the Earth today. Impact craters are the scars left behind when some of the larger portions of this infalling material (impactors) strike the planet’s surface. Craters can therefore be used to measure the amount and frequency of mass that impacts a large body such as the Earth. Although processes rapidly eliminate craters on the Earth, the nearby Moon retains a pristine record of recent cratering events.
This chapter examines the record of recent lunar cratering based on counts of young, bright, lunar craters with immature éjecta in order to place limitations on the nature of the impactor population affecting both the Moon and Earth in recent his- tory. Over time, soils on the lunar surface change (mature) because they are exposed to micrometeorite bombardment and the solar wind. Recent research shows that the maturity of lunar impact crater ejecta can be determined remotely from appropriate multi-spectral data. This ejecta maturity can be used to constrain the relative ages of lunar impact craters. The study of large (>20 km diameter) impact craters indicates that the lunar record does not support the idea of an overall increase in the impactor flux into Earth-Moon space in the last 800 Myr versus the previous 2.4 Gyr.
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Grier, J.A., McEwen, A.S. (2001). The Lunar Record of Recent Impact Cratering. In: Peucker-Ehrenbrink, B., Schmitz, B. (eds) Accretion of Extraterrestrial Matter Throughout Earth’s History. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8694-8_20
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