Lunar Mystery Solved

The Story

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.

Here at the USGS Astrogeology Research Program, team members on the Lunar Orbiter Digitization Project (LODP), led by Lisa Gaddis, 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) to have the feature named Stuart Crater and be included in the Gazeteer of Planetary Nomenclature in honor of Dr. Leon Stuart, who passed away in 1969.

Related Links & References

JPL News Release: NASA Solves Half-Century Old Moon Mystery - read the history of this story, see Stuart's photograph of the event, and read a summary of Buratti and Johnson's work

Icarus Volume 161 pages 1-198 (January 2003) : Access Buratti and Johnson's paper on the subject, Identification of the lunar flash of 1953 with a fresh crater on the moon's surface, pages 192-197

USGS Astro: Lunar Orbiter Digitization Project - find out more about this project and access data from the pilot project

USGS Astro: Map-a-Planet - access the Clementine lunar image map

LPI Digital Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon: - access digital versions of the imagery published in Bowker and Hughes' Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon

Gazeteer of Planetary Nomenclature - the listing of official names of planetary surface features

International Astronomical Union - the internationally recognised authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies and any surface features on them