A NEW CHRONOLOGY FOR THE MOON AND MERCURY

By Simone Marchi, Stefano Mottola, Gabriele Cremonese, Matteo Massironi, Elena Martellato. 2008

223 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we present a new method for dating the surface of the Moon, obtained by modeling the incoming flux of impactors and converting it into a size distribution of resulting craters. We compare the results from this model with the standard chronology for the Moon showing their similarities and discrepancies. In particular, we find indications of a nonconstant impactor flux in the last 500 Myr and also discuss the implications of our findings for the Late Heavy Bombardment hypothesis. We also show the potential of our model for accurate dating of other inner solar system bodies, by applying it to Mercury.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb39151477123b3889236a1a45da947c6d378da3

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

The orbital distribution of Near-Earth Objects inside Earth's orbit (2012, background): “Marchi et al. (2009) published a Mercury impact speed distribution in comparison with the Earth–Moon system based on a fraction of the Bottke et al. (2002) simulations; one must compare our results with their large (L) distribution shown in their Fig.”
The timeline of the lunar bombardment: Revisited (2018, methodology): “ig. 3 reports the density of craters (number per square kilometer) with diameter D>1 km as a function of lunar surface age, according to the crater counts in Neukum and Ivanov, (1984, green dots), Marchi et al. (2009, red dots) and Robbins (2014, blue crosses) on terrains with well determined rad”
Mercury’s Weather-Beaten Surface: Understanding Mercury in the Context of Lunar and Asteroidal Space Weathering Studies (2014, methodology): “If the timing of the lunar LHB and the size–frequency distributions of the bombarding population on the Moon apply to Mercury (Marchi et al. 2009), then Mercury’s Caloris basin formed late in the LHB, perhaps ∼3.95 Ga, and the major expanses of volcanic smooth plains interior and surrounding the…”
Nonuniform cratering of the Moon and a revised crater chronology of the inner Solar System (2011, methodology): “Fol-3 lowing the terminology of Marchi et al. (2009), we refer to this as a model4 production function.”