"The fractured Moon: Understanding the evolution of porosity and history of impacts on the Moon"

Abstract:
The lunar highlands have been subject to little modification by processes other than impacts, making them an ideal setting to investigate crustal porosity of planetary bodies, including that of the Archean Earth and pre-Noachian Mars. Porosity affects crustal permeability, surface area, and thermal conductivity. These, in turn, influence the chemical and mechanical reaction rates that drive many geological and ecological processes and the thermal and chemical evolution of planetary bodies. Furthermore, because porosity is influenced by impacts, it can be used to investigate the impact history of planetary surfaces.

In this talk I will describe efforts to use the lunar gravity field to constrain the porosity of the lunar crustal and its creation / destruction by individual impacts. I’ll discuss how these observations compare to impact modeling and how we use these observations to estimate the Moon’s bombardment history and historic porosity (and thus thermal conductivity).