Choose a continent and look as some of the craters. This site shows the location of the 160 known craters on Planet Earth. Open the Planetary and Space Science Center (PASSC) website. What caused the Lunar Maria to have a different age than the highlands?.Explain again how you were able to tell the difference between the relative age of the Lunar Highlands and the Lunar Maria. Return back to Lesson 6 (What can we learn by examining the Moon's surface). Although all objects in the Solar System are about the same age, features on the surface can be different, making the surface features older or younger either from one planet to the next or even for different locations on a given world.

In fact, the Earth, the Moon and all the planets and moons in the Solar System are about 4.6 billion years old. Investigations of the Earth and the Moon show that both worlds are about the same age, and that both are extremely old.

In this activity, students investigate the properties of planets and moons in the solar system. Everything is connected.Lesson Ten: Surface Activities on Planets and Moons Lesson Description “Our work confirms that Io’s mountains are ultimately a result of its prodigious volcanism. The excessive volcanism causes the stresses to be increasingly large at depth, so faulting initiates there and extends upward. “We show that mountain formation on Io is just the opposite. “Faulting on Earth usually occurs in the relatively shallow subsurface,” said Michael Bland, USGS scientist and lead author on the study. Understanding how these mountains form and how they are related to Io’s volcanism is one of the keys to understanding the overall geologic processes of Jupiter’s moon. Io’s mountains are also associated with the volcanic, crater-like features, called patera, at least at local scales. Unlike mountains on Earth, most of Io’s mountains are isolated rather than occurring together in mountain ranges or chains. Hi'iaka Patera is the irregularly shaped, dark depression at the center of the image. The sharp peak at the top of the image is about 36,300 feet high, and the two elongated plateaus to the west and south are about 11,500 feet high. “By studying a bizarre world like Io, we see unexpected interactions between geologic processes like volcanism and mountain building, which can ultimately help us better understand our home planet.”Īn image of Hi'iaka Montes and Hi'iaka Patera on Jupiter's volcanic moon Io. “This study is an outstanding example of how computer models can be used to see what is happening under the surface of a planet,” said Laszlo Kestay, USGS Astrogeology Science Center Director. The full report is available online in the journal Nature Geoscience. These results help explain the connection between mountains and volcanic crater-like features, called patera. In addition, modeling suggests that these large faults remove barriers in the crust, providing a pathway for magma to reach the surface. Scientists developed these findings using computer models of how the surface of a planet deforms. Results show, for the first time, that these lithospheric stresses do lead to thrust faulting deep in Io’s crust, uplifting large blocks of the planetary surface to form the mountains we see today. This is a result of compression in the planetary crust, brought on by the near-constant burial of the surface by newly erupted lava. Since the Galileo mission in the 1990s, planetary scientists have hypothesized that Io’s mountains formed through thrust faulting, where deep rocks are pushed up and over shallower rock layers. Io is a world of extremes: famous for its profuse volcanism, but also covered with some of the highest mountains in the Solar System - a few taller than Mount Everest.

Io moon surface characteristics