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Moon, QTVR file, 530Kb, 320x200.
| | Moon History
The lunar surface has different kinds of areas. The highlands are heavily-cratered. Other areas, called maria, are relatively smooth, and indeed the name comes from the Latin word for ?sea?. In the maria, rock is mainly basalt. Highland rocks are anorthosites. Almost all the rocks are igneous, which means that they were formed by lava cooling. In both maria and highlands, some of the rocks are breccias, mixtures of fragments of different types of rock that have been compacted and welded together. The Galileo spacecraft recorded spectral images of the Moon. Colors, from the ratios of brightness in different filters, show variations in the Moon's composition. The far side highland regions shown in red are similar to soils found in the near side highlands. Blue mare basalts have a relatively high titanium content. | |
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