discoverynews:

Our Growing, Shrinking Moon

New images from NASA suggests our moon is growing as well as shrinking.

We often think of the moon as a geologically dead fixture in our sky. That isn’t a bad thing; scientists have long looked at the moon a perfectly preserved slice of our solar system’s history.

But new images returned from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) suggest that our natural satellite isn’t dead at all. It’s actually pretty active having both shrank and grown fairly recently in its history.

The first evidence of an active moon came in 2010 when LRO’s camera returned high resolution pictures of landforms called lobate scarps. Previously found only in the equatorial regions in images from Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17, these lobe-shaped cliffs have now been found scattered across the lunar surface.

keep reading