By BlueShift | 2025-02-07

Two massive canyons on the Moon comparable in size to the Grand Canyon in North America were formed in less than 10 minutes, researchers said in a study published this week.

Scientists used photogeologic mapping to analyze the lunar canyons Vallis Schrödinger -- which measures 270km long and 2.7km deep -- and Vallis Planck -- which measures 280km long and 3.5km deep.

In comparison, the Grand Canyon spans about 446km and is at most 1.9km deep, the researchers noted. The massive terrestrial canyon was carved out of the Arizona desert by 5 million years of water erosion.

A team of scientists at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, an institute of the Universities Space Research Association in Houston, Texas, presented their scientific analysis of the creation of these "lunar grand canyons" in a study published February 4 in Nature Communications.

"The lunar landscape is dramatic," lead author David Kring told Space.com. "In the lunar south polar region, there are mountains that exceed Mt. Everest in height and canyons that exceed the Grand Canyon in depth."

"Future lunar surface explorers will be awed," he said.

'Staggering' force of impacts

The canyons extend outward from the northern rim of the Schrödinger Basin and were formed about 3.81 billion years ago by a cosmic impact -- when an asteroid or comet slammed into the Moon's far side, producing an asymmetrical pattern of crater excavation and transport of ejected debris, the study noted.

The team analyzed the ballistics of projectiles thrown by the impact and then determined how long it took to create the radial lunar grand canyons.

The velocities needed to throw the 0.5- to 1.25km blocks of ejecta that created the length of Vallis Schrödinger, assuming trajectory angles of between 20° and 45°, were around 1km per second.

The projectiles that created the farthest reach of the longer Vallis Planck had a slightly higher velocity of around 1.23 to 1.28km per second -- about half of the lunar escape velocity, the study noted.

These velocities, trajectory elevations and impact distances point to flight times for the ejected rock debris of 4.5 to 15 minutes for the creation of Vallis Schrödinger and 5.2 to 15.4 minutes for the longer Vallis Planck.

"The heaviest canyon forming impacts thus occurred within a 10-minute interval," Astronomy.com explained.

"Equally staggering is the calculated force of the impacts creating the chain of craters within Vallis Schrödinger," it said.

Artemis mission

"The valley was created by forces 700 times greater than the yield of all US, Russian and Chinese nuclear tests combined, or 130 times the power of the global inventory of nuclear weapons."

The Schrödinger Basin and its lunar grand canyons are on the southern far side of the Moon and therefore not visible from Earth, Astronomy.com pointed out.

But next year, Schrödinger is set to be visited by for the first time by a robotic lander built by Draper Laboratory in a commercial mission funded by NASA.

The Schrödinger Basin is also relatively near the Moon's southern pole -- one of the potential targets of the upcoming Artemis crewed landings.