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Half a century ago, at the height of the Cold War,
the space race between two competing superpowers
set mankind on an accelerated path toward placing a man on the moon.
In addition to its geopolitical significance,
the moon was central in the evolution of planetary science.
The discoveries of the Apollo missions sparked debates and help solidify
new consensus theories about the solar system's history.
One of the great surprises was at the pervasive cratering on the moon
seem to come in a single catastrophic period, which astronomers dubbed the
‘Late Heavy Bombardment’, a stupendously violent epoch of asteroids or comets
supposedly ripping through the inner solar system roughly 3.8 billion years ago.
Scientists admit that the cause of this hypothetical event is unknown.
The perhaps, the most popular theory involves Jupiter and Saturn somehow readjusting
their orbits with another giant planet being ejected from the solar system.
However, more recent discoveries have placed the late heavy bombardment theory under fire.
Scientists performing new analysis on a melted lunar rock
say they have found evidence of no fewer than four so-called bombardment events,
supposedly over the course of half a billion years,
between 3.3 and 3.8 billion years ago.
Analysis of another lunar rock, which was found just a few hundred yards away,
supposedly shows evidence of still another bombardment,
with a scientist to say happen precisely 3.83 billion years ago.
As one of the scientist told Time Magazine, this calls into question
just how well we know the chronology of lunar impacts.
However, despite surprising discoveries it seems that scientists remain
unready to question the underlying assumptions about the moon's history.
One assumption is that radiometric dating techniques provide with bedrock
reliability a time line of the moon's history over billions of years.
Another assumption is that the craters can only be the result of impacts from space.
To accept these assumptions requires that one ignore mountains of evidence
that high-energy electrical discharges have defined the lunar surface.
Events that would have left their signatures in the forms of radiation,
remnant magnetism and global electrical scarring.
It is useful to look back at the evolution of the consensus theories
about the moon in the face of unexpected discoveries.
In fact, many the most surprising discoveries from the Apollo missions
affirm catastrophic electromagnetic events in the moon's recent past.
It must be noted that one of the great scientific heretics in modern times,
Immanuel Velikovsky, made several outrageous predictions about the Apollo findings.
Including the discovery of remnant magnetism, a steep thermal gradient,
radioactive hot spots and regular moonquakes.
A colleague of Velikovsky, the engineer Ralph Juergens, conducted a comprehensive
investigation and analysis the puzzling sinuous rilles on the lunar surface.
A sinuous rille is a long winding valley, usually with steep walls and
often emerging from a crater, which can be found on the moon and countless scales.
Prior to the Apollo missions astronomers early hypotheses
suggested that the rilles were “cracks on the moon's surface”.
Later guesses included flowing water
until a planetary scientist settled on flowing lava as the agent.
Today, the accepted theories at the moon’s sinuous rilles were created
either by lava flowing across the surface or beneath the ground
to form a “lava tube”, portions of which eventually collapsed.
Juergens compared the respective point-by-point requirements of various
competing theories versus the actual observed characteristics of the rilles.
Unlike planetary scientists, Juergens included among the
possible agents high-energy electrical discharge.
On every evidentiary point the electrical discharge hypothesis is either predictable
or permissible and unlike every competing hypothesis in not a single instance does
the observed evidence preclude electrical discharge as the cause of the rilles.
However, even prior to Juergens investigation, several mainstream scientists had
noted that flowing liquids, whether water or lava, could not have caused the observed
features at the lunar rilles, including strings of craters along the rilles floors.
Today planetary scientists favor the notion that the famous lunar feature,
Hadley Rille, is a collapsed lava tube,
however, the rille does not match the required
characteristics of lava tubes on numerous points,
most importantly the collapsed areas of a lava tube will be rubble filled depressions.
High-resolution images at the rilles reveal no rubble and no collapsed roofs,
it is simply an empty sharply cut channel, which matches
the expected characteristics of an electrical “breakdown channel”.
Both the width and the length of the largest lunar rilles,
extending up to 300 km long is vastly greater than anything achieved by lava
on earth with the longest terrestrial rilles a near 35 km long.
However, the precise opposite should be expected.
On the earth, the atmosphere is insulating, allowing lava to retain its heat.
In the vacuum of space, heat will be much more rapidly radiated away.
On earth, as lava flows for long distances, counted at most in a few tens of kilometers
rather than hundreds, the cooling at the surface causes a “roof” to form,
it may then continue to flow as a “tube” beneath the surface,
that is the only way the lava tubes can achieve even their modest lengths.
Consider the most prominent lunar rille, called Schroter's Valley,
160 km long and up 10 km wide, its depth at points reaches up to an amazing 300 meters.
Flowing lava eating away surface material to cut
a deep channel would have to show up somewhere,
we should see either breaches in the deep walls or evidence of abundant outflow,
but instead the channel simply dwindles until it disappears.
Curiously, the so-called flow of rilles in other world isn't limited
to “downhill” like lava and water carved channels on earth.
All fluid erosion theories have chosen to ignore that the apparent mouth to the
“stream” is on high ground and the narrowest part of the channel is on lower ground.
We also note that in Schroter's Valley is a much more narrow
secondary rille whose defining feature is a chain of small craters.
Indeed, crater chains on countless planets and moons present yet another
puzzle that the planetary sciences have failed to adequately explain.
Consider this image of the extraordinary lunar crater chain, Catena Davy,
scientists today recognized that neither so-called secondary cratering from a
source impact nor volcanism are likely causes the crater chains.
Since there is no evidence that ejecta from any crater overlays any neighboring craters
they are thought to have been formed at the same time in a single event.
The consensus today is that a single body broke apart due to tidal effects
and somehow produced the exquisite evenly spaced crater chain.
The official website for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera describes
the crater chain as follows:
“As was seen with Shoemaker-Levy 9, a weakly held together planetary body (such as a comet or rubble pile asteroid), can be fragmented and separated by tidal forces if it comes within the Roche limit have a larger body, and drawn out into such a string of objects.”
“Similar crater chains have been discovered on several moons of the outer planets where the gravity wells of these gas giants are sufficient to pull bodies apart in this way. What might have done this within the inner Solar System, where planetary tidal forces are weaker?”
“In the case of Catena Davy, where the impact craters rest ‘shoulder to shoulder,’ the impactors may have been pulled apart shortly before impact, and struck the Moon in a rapid-fire sequence of short duration, rather than having been widely separated and striking over time.”
Among its many problems, this conjecture fails to disclose
what we learned in Shoemaker-Levy 9's encounter with Jupiter.
As described in detail in the previous Space News “Why don't comets melt in the Sun”,
the extraordinary electromagnetic energies that comet produced
were exponentially greater than anything astronomers had anticipated.
Whereas astronomers had expected the encounter to be as trivial as
“pebbles falling into the ocean”, Jupiter’s radiation belts brightened and reveal
the source of “extra electrons” that shocked astronomers and remains a mystery.
If Jupiter were a rocky planet, the extraordinary electromagnetic energies would
have surely produce the kind of electrical scarring effects routinely reproduced
in experiments with electrical discharges including chains of craters which appear
indistinguishable from the crater chains seen on every rocky body including the moon.
Imagine the improbability of a stream of rocks flying at thousands of miles per hour
creating this chain of cleanly cut circular craters, all of which appear
to have been excavated from directly above, rather than from sideswiping impacts.
And here we see emphasize yet another unresolved
crisis in the theory of lunar impact cratering.
More than 90% of circular craters on the moon require the supposed impactors
to hit the surface vertically forcing theorist to suggest that hypervelocity impacts
cause explosions that occur above the ground and generates circular craters,
but it is surely no coincidence that electric arcs
always strike the surface from directly above.
Like every other rocky body in the solar system, countless craters on the moon
will never be explained by either volcanism or the impact hypothesis.
In a forthcoming space news episode we will continue our exploration at the lunar surface
and will look more closely at several so-called anomalous craters on the moon
and the ideal analog they find in laboratory experiments with electrical discharges.
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