The Incredible Shrinking Moon A recent article that appeared in
the journal Science led to a flurry of shrinking Moon headlines.
Don’t worry, the Moon is still there, and will be for some time
yet. But seeing as the images for this study came from the LROC
camera that we all know and love, I thought it’d be worth re-
telling the story here. Figure 1. A perspective image looking
across the Taurus-Littrow valley, made from LROC stereo images
M104311715LE and M104318871LE. The arrow shows the Apollo 17
landing site, with the Lee-Lincoln lobate scarp in the left of
the image. This scarp runs across the valley floor mare and up
through highland material. Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State
University/Smithsonian Lobate scarps are probably amongst the
smallest tectonic features on the Moon, and so they are too
small to be visible in telescopic images, but rather only the
highest resolution images from orbiting spacecraft. In the past
they were only visible in Apollo Panoramic Camera high
resolution images, which only