Moon Zoo? What is that? Moon Zoo is a social experiment, or at least I would call it one, in which common people look at different images of the moon. They then make judgments about what they see in these images. These images come from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the judgments they make could be one of several things. You may be asked to identify any craters that you can see in the image. You may be asked to compare two images and decide which has the most boulders. Answering these questions, and others, helps scientists understand the moon, and thus, helps them to understand the universe around us. Heck, you may even spot some lost Russian hardware.
The aim of Moon Zoo is to provide detailed crater counts for as much as the Moon’s surface as possible. Unlike here on Earth where weather quickly erodes any signs of all but the most recent impacts, craters on the lunar surface stay almost until eternity. That means that the number of craters on a particular piece of the surface tells us how old it is. This technique is used all over the Solar System, but the Moon is particularly important because we have ground truth — samples brought back by the Apollo missions — which allow us to calibrate our estimates. Planetary scientists have always carried out this kind of analysis on large scales, but with your help and the fabulous LRO images then we should be able to uncover the finer details of the Moon’s history.
via : Moon Zoo
