NASA’s Grail Paints the Moon Abstract It looks like some sort of modern art piece, but this actually represents the most high-resolution gravity map of the Moon ever created. Wait, scratch that. The highest resolution gravity map of anything in space, including Earth. The Earth, Moon and other celestial bodies look round, but they (and their gravity) aren’t perfectly even and spherical. The GRAIL mission uses a pair of satellites orbiting the Moon who sense the slight bumps and blips in gravity by watching how their position relative to one another changes. We’ve looked at how that works before. The colors in the photo represent tiny fluctuations in the Moon’s gravity, just like we see on Earth. Check out io9 for more. Funny side note: You get some really interesting results when you do a Google image search for things that look like that Moon map. Truly abstract, beautiful science.
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NASA’s Grail Paints the Moon Abstract

It looks like some sort of modern art piece, but this actually represents the most high-resolution gravity map of the Moon ever created. Wait, scratch that. The highest resolution gravity map of anything in space, including Earth. The Earth, Moon and other celestial bodies look round, but they (and their gravity) aren’t perfectly even and spherical.

The GRAIL mission uses a pair of satellites orbiting the Moon who sense the slight bumps and blips in gravity by watching how their position relative to one another changes. We’ve looked at how that works before. The colors in the photo represent tiny fluctuations in the Moon’s gravity, just like we see on Earth.

Check out io9 for more. Funny side note: You get some really interesting results when you do a Google image search for things that look like that Moon map. Truly abstract, beautiful science.

Source: io9.com

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