image source: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/images/lunarswirls/rgamma_med.jpg
Picture this: A cup of coffee, steaming and black. Add a dollop of milk and gently stir. Eddies of cream go swirling around the cup.
Magnify that image a million times and you've got a Lunar Swirl.
Lunar swirls are strange markings on the Moon that resemble the cream in your coffee—on a much larger scale. They seem to be curly-cues of pale
moondust, twisting and turning across the lunar surface for dozens of miles. Each swirl is utterly flat and protected by a magnetic field.
Apollo missions did provide evidence for past Lunar magnetic fields - but it was always question about origin of magnetism : core dynamo - has Moon
ever a molten core? or meteorite impact?
What are they? "We don't know," says Bob Lin of UC Berkeley, who has been studying the swirls for almost 40 years. "These things are very
strange."
..and they are magnetized - was found accidently in connection with NASA researched Earth magnetotail- Moon pass through tail once a month.
"The swirls have magnetic fields measuring a few hundred nano-Tesla (nT) at ground level," says Lin. (Earth's magnetic field, for comparison,
is 30,000 nT.) "If you walked around a swirl with a magnetic compass, the needle would swing back and forth in a confusing way. You'd quickly get
lost because the magnetic fields are so jumbled."
“What are swirls made of? Are they truly flat?“ - Moon Mineralogy Mapper due to launch in 2008 - could say more...
Apollo missions did provide evidence for past Lunar magnetic fields - but it was always question about origin of magnetism : core dynamo - has Moon
ever a molten core? or meteorite impact? So if you have a magnetic field region it would bee shilde against solar wind and solar radiation - thise
water deposites would bee preserved!?
[edit on 22-6-2007 by blue bird]
