September 16, 2014

Odd Interiors

image by Paolo R. Lazzarotti, Italy

The northeastern shore of Mare Nectaris is littered with craters having odd interiors. One of the oddest is Gaudibert, near bottom center, a 33 km wide feature with a rim inside another rim, and an interior completely full of lumpy massifs, one cut by a flat-floored rille segment. Just below are two smaller, craters, Gaudibert A and B, with two different interiors. A, to the west, is full of small hills that almost form a ring with a annular depression. B is cut by a couple of small rilles and one larger one that starts in a crater on its southern rim. Under high Sun, the crater is revealed to be the source of a dark pyroclastic deposit, and another source is in the hills immediately to the east. B is a floor-fractured crater. Below center, near the left margin, is another bizarre crater. Daguerre is defined by a not-quite complete rim crest that rises a few hundred meters above its lava-filled floor. The northeast rim is the center of another pyroclastic deposit. And to the east are slabs of lava that appear cut by small faults, suggesting that after the lavas solidified they were fractured. Even thought there are no sinuous rilles, nor domes, this area was affected by volcanism.

Chuck Wood

Related Links
21st Century Atlas chart 7.
Paolo's website

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