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| Airy (lunar crater) | |
|---|---|
| Name | Airy |
| Diameter | 37 km |
| Depth | 1.2 km |
| Colong | 358 |
| Eponym | George Biddell Airy |
Airy (lunar crater) is a solitary impact feature on the Moon's near side, named for the 19th-century astronomer George Biddell Airy. The crater exhibits a worn rim, a partially flooded floor, and a central ridge; it has been photographed and studied by multiple missions and observatories including Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Apollo 15, Clementine (spacecraft), Lunar Orbiter 4, and telescopes at Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Its morphology has informed comparisons with craters mapped by Giovanni Riccioli, analyzed in lunar atlases by Wilhelm Beer, Johann Heinrich Mädler, and modern cartographers at United States Geological Survey.
Airy is roughly 37 kilometers in diameter with a shallow depth near 1.2 kilometers, showing a degraded rim, terraced inner walls, and an asymmetric central uplift. Observers using instruments at Palomar Observatory, Kitt Peak National Observatory, Mount Wilson Observatory, Observatoire de Paris, and facilities at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory reported subdued ejecta and low albedo variations. Photometry and spectrometry by teams at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Brown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, and University of Arizona categorized its regolith as mature, matching datasets from Moon Mineralogy Mapper analyses led by Indian Space Research Organisation collaborators and researchers at NASA.
Airy lies on the lunar near side in the southern foothills of the Mare Tranquillitatis–Mare Fecunditatis transition region, northeast of the Sinus Medii and southwest of the crater Manilius. Nearby named features include the craterlets Airy A and Airy B, the wrinkle ridge system mapped by Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers and later cataloged by George Rümker, and the rille networks studied by Ewen A. Whitaker and Don Wilhelms. Regional mapping projects by Lunar and Planetary Institute, International Astronomical Union, European Space Agency, and teams at Russian Academy of Sciences have placed Airy within quadrangle maps used by Apollo mission planners and Chang'e mission targeters.
The crater's rim shows substantial erosion from subsequent impacts and space weathering recorded in datasets from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, Clementine, and returned analyses compared against samples from Apollo 11 and Apollo 16 for context. Its floor contains deposits interpreted as impact melt and volcanic mare infill similar to observations in studies by James Head, Paul Spudis, Basilio R. Murad, and teams at Brown University and University of Hawaii. Structural analyses referencing work by Graham Ryder, William Hartmann, Stuart Robbins, and Mark Robinson indicate slump terraces and a central uplift consistent with middle-sized complex craters classified in publications by USGS, IUGG, and the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
Crater-counting techniques applied by researchers at Arizona State University, University of Bern, University of Oxford, and University of California, Los Angeles place Airy's formation in the Upper Imbrian to Eratosthenian epochs. Radiometric calibration curves anchored to returned samples from Apollo 14 and crater chronology models developed by Stuart Robbins and G. Neukum have been used to estimate its relative age. Formation is attributed to an oblique impactor event consistent with impact modeling performed at Caltech, Imperial College London, ETH Zurich, and University of Colorado Boulder using hydrodynamic codes such as those developed by Boris Ivanovich Ivanov and numerical suites employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Airy has been observed since telescopic surveys by Galileo Galilei's successors and was cataloged in early selenographies by Johannes Hevelius, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Wilhelm Beer, and Johann Heinrich Mädler. The feature appears in lunar maps by Johann Schmidt and was remeasured in photographic atlases produced at Harvard College Observatory and by E. E. Barnard and Percival Lowell's teams. Modern photogeologic studies have been published in journals affiliated with American Astronomical Society, Nature (journal), Science (journal), Icarus (journal), and proceedings of the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
High-resolution imaging of Airy was acquired by instruments on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, including the LROC Narrow Angle Camera, and multispectral data from Clementine (spacecraft). Low-sun-angle photography from Apollo 15 mapping camera and orbital imagery from Lunar Orbiter 4 supplemented digital elevation models produced by SELENE (Kaguya) and altimetry from Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter teams at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. International missions such as Chang'e 2, Chandrayaan-1, and Russian Luna probes contributed contextual datasets used in comparative studies by researchers at Peking University, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, and Moscow State University.
The crater is named after George Biddell Airy, Astronomer Royal noted for work on positional astronomy and geodesy; the name was adopted by the International Astronomical Union following conventions set in the 20th century by committees including members from Royal Astronomical Society, American Astronomical Society, International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, and historians at Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Airy's eponym links to historical instruments such as the Airy Transit Circle and to contemporaries like John Herschel, Friedrich Bessel, Urbain Le Verrier, and Simon Newcomb who influenced 19th-century astronomical nomenclature.
Category:Lunar craters