The moon has many more craters than we thought, a new study finds.
More than 109,000 new craters were discovered in the low and mid-latitude regions of the moon using artificial intelligence (AI) given the data collected by the Chinese lunar orbit.
The number of craters recorded on the lunar surface is now a dozen times greater than before. The findings were published in the December 22 issue of the journal Nature Communications.
Chen Yang, an associate professor of earth sciences at Jilin University in China, has the largest lunar crate database with automated extraction for the central and lower latitudes of China.
Related: China on the moon! History of Chinese lunar missions in pictures
Effect craters, formed during meteor strikes, cover most of the moon’s surface.
Yang said the craters of impact are considered the lunar equivalent of “fossils,” which “record the history of the Solar System,” Yang said.
However these “remains” can change dramatically in size and shape, and they can overlap and crumble over time. This makes dating and dating extremely difficult and time consuming. The process is also subjective, causing inconsistencies in existing databases.
Yang and his team approached these issues with machine learning. They trained deep neural networks (where computers use mathematical calculation levels that feed each other) with data from thousands of previously known craters and preached algorithms to discover new ones. The network was then applied to data collected by the Change-1 and Change-2 lunar orbits, which revealed 109,956 additional craters on the lunar surface.
A significant number of craters identified in this study are classified as “small” to “medium” in size, although from Earthling’s point of view, they are still very large, ranging from 0.6 miles to 60 miles (1 to 100 kilometers) in diameter. The relatively small size of the craters is probably why they were not discovered before.
But the AI program also destroyed many large, irregularly shaped craters, some of which were 341 miles (550 km) in diameter.
The algorithm is also estimated when about 19,000 craters were built based on their features, such as size and depth, and assigning each to a geographical period. These pits extend over the lunar geological period of the Moon, and some are about 4 billion years behind.
The team hopes to improve their crater-spotting algorithm by feeding data to the recently launched Chang5 Lender, which recently took lunar samples to Earth.
Researchers want to adapt and apply their machine-learning approach to other bodies in the solar system, including planets like Mars.
“This estimate will usually take a few minutes after a few hours of post-processing on the calculated hardware,” the researchers wrote in the study.
Published on Original Living Science.
