Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna

They named this the oriental basin.

We now know that oriental is the youngest, freshest, best preserved impact basin.

If you want to understand impact basins, oriental is your go-to basin.

And that was discovered right here.

When they looked at this, they said, all of these scarps, that looks kind of like a fault scar, a cliff that has a fault underneath it extending down into the earth.

So they interpreted there to be faults underlying these scarps penetrating deep into the lunar interior.

When they looked, they saw dark patches in some of those rings.

And they said, that looks like lava.

That looks like volcanic deposits.

We think that maybe that lava

flowed up through those faults and erupted on the surface.

At this time, in 1962, that was speculation based on some fuzzy Earth-based images.

Now, 2017, we've got the data we can use to actually test their ideas.

So this is the Oriental Basin as I typically think of it.

This is a topography map of Oriental.

You can see the Central Depression and these beautiful bullseye ring pattern around it.

All of these red lines of mountains with scarps along the edges of it, that's what they were seeing in their images projected onto that sphere.

Now we can take the topography and look at the Bouguer gravity looking into the subsurface of Oriental.

What they were trying to interpret from their images, we can now image with gravity data.

So here's the gravity map of Oriental.