Description
The rotational axis of the Moon lies within Shackleton, only a few kilometers from its center. The crater is 21 km in diameter and 4.2 km deep. From the Earth, it is viewed edge-on in a region of rough, cratered terrain. It is located within the South Pole-Aitken basin on a massif. The rim is slightly raised about the surrounding surface and it has an outer rampart that has been only lightly impacted. No significant craters intersect the rim, and it is sloped about 1.5° toward the direction 50–90° from the Earth. The age of the crater is about 3.6 billion years and it has been in the proximity of the south lunar pole for at least the last two billion years.
Because the orbit of the Moon is tilted only 5° from the ecliptic, the interior of this crater lies in perpetual darkness. Peaks along the rim of the crater are almost continually illuminated by sunlight, spending about 80–90% of each lunar orbit exposed to the Sun. Continuously illuminated mountains have been termed peaks of eternal light and have been predicted to exist since the 1900s.
The shadowed portion of the crater was imaged with the Terrain Camera of the Japanese SELENE spacecraft using the illumination of sunlight reflected off the rim. The interior of the crater consists of a symmetrical 30° slope that leads down to a 6.6 km diameter floor. The handful of craters along the interior span no more than a few hundred meters. The bottom is covered by an uneven mound-like feature that is 300 to 400 m thick. The central peak is about 200 m in height.
The continuous shadows in the south polar craters cause the floors of these formations to maintain a temperature that never exceeds about 100 K. For Shackleton, the average temperature was determined to be about 90 K, reaching 88 K at the crater floor. Under these conditions, the estimated rate of loss from any ice in the interior would be 10−26 to 10−27 m/s. Any water vapor that arrives here following a cometary impact on the Moon would lie permanently frozen on or below the surface. However, the surface albedo of the crater floor matches the lunar far-side, suggesting that there is no exposed surface ice.
This crater was named after Ernest Henry Shackleton, an Anglo-Irish explorer of Antarctica from 1901 until his death in 1922. The name was officially adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1994. Nearby craters of note include Shoemaker, Haworth, de Gerlache, Sverdrup, and Faustini. Somewhat farther away, on the eastern hemisphere of the lunar near side, are the larger craters Amundsen and Scott, named after two other early explorers of the Antarctic continent.
Read more about this topic: Shackleton (crater)
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