HOUSTON: Scientists have discovered
moon's biggest and deepest crater—some 2,400 kms long and 9 km deep
— using data from a Nasa instrument that flew aboard India's maiden
unmanned lunar mission Chandrayaan-I.
The US Space agency's Moon
Mineralogy Mapper (M3) detected the enormous crater — the South
Pole-Aitken basin — that was created when an asteroid smacked into moon's
southern hemisphere shortly after the formation of earth's only natural
satellite.
"This is the biggest and deepest crater on the moon
— an abyss that could engulf the US from the east coast through Texas,"
said lead researcher Noah Petro of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt.
According to Petro, "The impact of the asteroid collison
punched into the layers of the lunar crust, scattering that material across the
moon and into space".
