Taken From :<http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/HotTopics/20030307_stuartscrater.html>
Also 3 Meg Tiff file of Crater:<http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/HotTopics/stuartcrater/LOIV109h1_portion_labels_inset.tif>
Lunar Mystery Solved
On the morning of November 15, 1953, amateur astronomer Dr. Leon Stuart photographed what he believed to be a massive, white-hot fireball of vaporized rock rising from the center of the Moon's face. If his theory was correct, he would be the first and only human in history to witness and document the impact of an asteroid-sized body impacting the Moon. Almost a half-century passed, and what had become known in astronomy circles as "Stuart's Event" was still an unproven, controversial theory.
Bonnie J. Buratti, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Lane Johnson of Pomona College, Claremont, Calif., took a fresh look at the 50-year-old lunar mystery. Buratti and Johnson first looked at imagery from the Lunar Orbiter mission, but were unable to definitively identify a candidate crater that would be the evidence of the event. They then turned to Clementine mission imagery, which offers more color information than Lunar Orbiter imagery. With Clementine mission data, they have identified a crater that is most likely the result of "Stuart's Event", validating his claim to have seen the impact. Buratti and Johnson's study appears in the January 2003 issue of the space journal, Icarus <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=IssueURL%38;_tockey=%23TOC%236821%232003%23998389998%23385584%23FLA%23Volume_161,_Issue_1,_Pages_1-198_%28January_2003%29%38;_auth=y%38;view=c%38;_acct=C000050221%38;_version=1%38;_urlVersion=0%38;_userid=10%38;md5=11fe84638513d51d0d78a4dd607ae08b>.
Here at the USGS Astrogeology Research Program, team members on the Lunar Orbiter Digitization Project (LODP) <http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/LunarOrbiterDigitization/>, led by Lisa Gaddis <http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/About/People/LisaGaddis/>, have looked at their reconstructed imagery of the region and found evidence of a crater supporting Buratti and Johnson's claim. For the LODP project, team members are scanning film strips from the Lunar Orbiter Mission, digitally mosaicking the strips into frames, and enhancing the results to remove errors and artifacts such as striping. Because the crater lies on the edge of a film strip, the crater is partially obscured in existing mosaics published in the /Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon/ by Bowker and Hughes (NASA SP-206, 1971). With the improved mosaics being created by LODP, the crater identified by Buratti and Johnson can be seen clearly in the reconstructed Lunar Orbiter image data (see the images to the left).
Suggestions have been submitted to the the International Astronomical Union (IAU) <http://www.iau.org/> to have the feature named Stuart Crater and be included in the Gazeteer of Planetary Nomenclature <http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov> in honor of Dr. Leon Stuart, who passed away in 1969.
______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
