New Moon Crater Discovered, or Why You Shouldn’t Pack Your Globe in a Suitcase

Monday, July 6th, 2009

In my last entry I wrote about the first LRO image, which was acquired over a narrow swath of territory near a crater with the curious name of Hell. Naturally, I wanted to see where this crater was, so I got out my lunar globe.

So first I have to tell you a story about this globe. I bought it at the Johnson Space Center gift shop in 2003, while I was attending the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. At that time my book was almost ready to come out — in fact, I think the publication date was only a week or two after the conference ended. I saw this globe in the gift shop, and thought it would be a good idea for me to have a lunar globe that I could refer to when I was giving book readings. Seventy-five dollars later, the globe was mine. They were probably glad to get rid of it; after all, who goes around buying lunar globes these days? In fact, the globe came with an information booklet that clearly had not been updated since the early 1970s.

Unfortunately, I decided to bring the globe back home in my suitcase. As my wife will tell you, I don’t have a lot of common sense. And when I got back to California, I discovered my beautiful new lunar globe … with two new craters that hadn’t been there before.

One of them happens to be close to the place that I was writing about in my last blog post. So when I showed my wife where Hell Crater was, she deadpanned: “That’s a hella crater, all right!”

Don't Let This Happen to Your Globe

Tags: LPSC, LRO, spousal overunit
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