New Study Identifies Over 109,000 Previously Unrecognized Impact Craters On Lunar Surface

Researchers have identified new impact craters on Moon’s surface. According to a study, an international team of researchers has identified as many as 109,000 impact craters. The study was led by researchers from Jilin University in China. They said that these impact craters were previously unrecognized. The study said that new impact craters on the lunar surface were identified using machine learning methods. The impact craters occupy most of the lunar surface. Researchers said that it is quite difficult to identify these impact craters using the set of traditional automatic identification methods. The traditional methods cannot identify irregular craters.

Researchers said that they have also estimated their age. They applied a transfer learning method to arrive at a conclusion. They used the data of craters that were identified in the past. They prepared a deep neural network. Researchers combined the data collected by the country’s two lunar probes — Chang’e-1 and Chang’e-2. This helped the researchers in identifying 109,956 new impact craters on the lunar surface. The estimated ages of 18,996 craters are said to be greater than 4.97 miles in diameter. Chang’e 1 was launched in 2007. It was an unmanned lunar-orbiting spacecraft. It was followed by Chang’e 2 in 2010.

According to Jilin University, researchers have also made a database of the new impact craters. The database is for the mid and low-latitude regions. It said that the database is of great value for future studies. It will help scientists involved in exploring the Moon. The varsity added that the latest strategy can be adopted in the future to conduct crater studies. It claimed that the methods are reliable and generate authentic data. Meanwhile, the Chinese space agency said that it applied the model to identify a small impact crater at the landing site of Chang’e 5. Chang’e 5 was a robotic mission. It returned recently with lunar rocks and soil. China has now joined the league of two nations in bringing back lunar samples. The two other countries are the United States and Russia.