Abstract
In the preceding chapter a survey has been given of the principal sources of heat inside an astronomical body whose mass is of the same order of magnitude as that of the Moon; and of the way in which this heat is likely to be distributed in the course of time. The time-dependence of the sources of radiogenic heat, together with the gradual cooling of lunar globe by escape of its thermal radiation into space, is bound to render the distribution of temperature inside the Moon a function of the time and, as such, will give rise to thermal stresses in its interior considered as an elastic solid, together with gravitational stresses produced by the self-attraction of the lunar mass. It is true that, in view of the relatively high temperatures likely to be prevalent in lunar interior (as described in the preceding chapter), its mass need not necessarily behave as a perfectly elastic solid; and the possibility of departures from such a state will be discussed in the next chapter; the subject matter of the present chapter being reserved for a discussion of the behaviour of the lunar globe to gravitational, thermal, or other stresses to which the body of the Moon responds as an elastic solid.
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Bibliographical Notes
A study of the stress history of the Moon has been opened up by MacDonald (1960) who, however, in this paper considered only the global effects. A treatment of the subject as given in this chapter follows, however, largely that by Kopal (1961, 1962a, 1963) in which the distribution of stresses in the interior of a thermally strained sphere is explicitly taken into account. The numerical results are taken largely from Kopal (1962a). A coupling of the thermo-mechanical effects has first been formulated by Duhamel (1837) in a great memoir which has since remained classic. Of more recent work on this subject cf., e.g., Jeffreys (1929), Lowan (1935) or Lapwood (1952). For the thermo-elastic effects of insolation and their influence on the form of the Moon and its moments of inertia cf. Kopal (1965a).
The problems of free isothermal oscillation of elastic solid globes, a discussion of which concludes this section, has in recent years been considered extensively in connection with seismological problems of the Earth (cf., e.g., Alterman, Jarosch and Pekeris, 1959); and numerical applications to the Moon are due to Bolt (1960), Takeuchi, Saito and Kobayashi (1961), or Carr and Kovach (1962).
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© 1966 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kopal, Z. (1966). Stress History of the Moon. In: An Introduction to the Study of the Moon. Astrophysics and Space Science Library. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6320-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6320-2_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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