A paper entitled “Prolonged rock exhumation at the rims of kilometer-scale lunar craters” by graduate student Cole Nypaver (UTenn/Knoxville), Brad Thomson (both at (UTenn/Knoxville), Caleb Fassett (ST13), Ed Rivera-Valentin (USRA/Lunar & Planetary Institute), and Wes Patterson (Johns Hopkins/Applied Physics Lab) was accepted for publication in Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets. The paper showed that rocks at kilometer-scale impact crater rims are continually being uncovered due to the downslope movement of the overlying regolith, so even craters billions of years old can have superposed meter-scale rocks on their rim. These boulders may be valuable targets for future lunar sample collection, as these exhumed rocks are likely to be local and unlikely to have undergone transport from distant parts of the Moon. The work was supported as part of a Lunar Data Analysis project led by Fassett.
Read the paper at https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2021JE006897.
(a) Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) image of a simple impact crater with a diameter of ∼2.0 km on Mare Nubium (20.206°N, 9.031°E) with a modeled age of ∼3.7 Ga (κt: 26,203, Fassett & Thomson, 2014) and a (b) enhanced image of the NE portion of the crater rim with red arrows indicating boulders present in this region and white arrows indicating small impact craters amongst the boulders.