Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna

I think this helps give you a sense of scale of these rifts just stretching off to the horizon.

Here's another one here.

Here's one where we see a pattern of two parallel rift valleys, something we also see very commonly in rift zones.

And then superimposed on the moon as we see it from Earth, this giant square pattern of rift valleys.

Now, we think this is what these structures actually are, but this is bizarre.

I have to say, no one would have ever expected a Rift Valley on the Moon.

We don't have a better explanation of the gravity data, but Rift Valleys on the Moon are just not something we talk about.

We know about Rift Valleys on Earth.

We know about Rift Valleys on Mars.

We know about Rift Valleys on Venus.

But the Moon, this is something unexpected that we still really don't understand the processes responsible for and driving this.

And that's kind of how I want to, the note I want to end on is really the dark secrets lurking behind the dark side of the moon.

You know, the dark side of the moon symbolically in pop culture is really, symbolizes the unknown.

And one thing I want to convey to you, we've learned so much about the moon in the last 50 years worth of spacecraft exploration.

It's incredible the data we have.

It's incredible what we do know.

But it's also amazing what we don't know about the Earth's nearest neighbor.

And there's still a lot of work left to be done.

And so I just want to talk a little bit about, in my mind, what some of these big questions, these big unanswered questions are regarding the moon.

So one thing that we are still debating, we still don't understand, is how did the moon actually form?