Space weathering is a blanket term used for a number of processes that act on any body exposed to the harsh space environment. Airless bodies (including the Moon, Mercury, the asteroids, comets, and some of the moons of other planets) incur many weathering processes:
- collisions of galactic cosmic rays and solar cosmic rays,
- irradiation, implantation, and sputtering from solar wind particles, and
- bombardment by different sizes of meteorites and micrometeorites.
Space weathering is important because these processes affect the physical and optical properties of the surface of many planetary bodies. Therefore, it is critical to understand the effects of space weathering in order to properly interpret remotely sensed data.
Read more about Space Weathering: History, Effects On Spectral Properties, Space Weathering On Asteroids, Space Weathering On Mercury, References
Famous quotes containing the words space and/or weathering:
“The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical,
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.”
—Anonymous.
“No paradise, no fall,
Only the weathering land
The wheeling sky,
Man, with is Satan
Scouring the chaos of the mind.
Oh Hell!”
—Gary Snyder (b. 1930)