lunar formation
catdynamics | June 9, 2014"There is no dark side of the moon really.
Matter of fact it's all dark."
While the Moon has a nearside and a farside, it does not, actually, have a dark side or a light side, now. At least not a fixed dark side, just a slowly moving night side, and day side.
But it used to. Sorta.
"I remember the first time I saw a globe of the moon as a boy, being struck by how different the farside looks," said Jason Wright, assistant professor of astrophysics. "It was all mountains and craters. Where were the maria? It turns out it's been a mystery since the fifties."
Jason, Arpita Roy a Penn State grad…
catdynamics | June 8, 2014"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall on the Dark Side of the Moon..."
The Astrowright has been doing some lunatic slow blogging on an interesting problem:
The Nearside of the Moon
from Ron Hodges - NASA medialibrary
The Farside
from apod
One of these is not like the other...
Jason discusses how we came to be thinking about these things in Part I:
A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall on the Dark Side of the Moon I: The Lunar Farside Highlands Problem
It is an interesting problem.
The dichotomy is not superficial
From GRAIL press release 2011
A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall on the Dark Side of the Moon II…