The geologic history of the moon / Геологическая история луны

The Moon held little interest for most scientists after its basic astronomic properties had been determined and before direct exploration appeared likely (Wright and others, 1963; Baldwin, 1978). Speculations about its internal structure, composition, and origin were only broadly constrained by cosmochemical data from meteorites and solar spectra, and by astronomic data about its size, shape, motions, and surficial properties (Urey, 1951, 1952; Kuiper, 1954). Most investigators who were active before the space age began in 1957 believed that significant new advances in lunar knowledge required acquisition of additional data.
One analytical technique, however, was insufficiently exploited before the 1960’s. Few scientists since the geologist Gilbert (1893) had studied the lunar surface systematically from the historical point of view. Those who did immediately obtained important new insights about the Moon’s postaccretion evolution (Baldwin, 1949, 1963; Kuiper, 1959). Then, the pioneering work ofE.M. Shoemaker and R.J. Hackman focused the powerful methods of stratigraphy on lunar problems (Hackman and Mason, 1961; Shoemaker, 1962a, b; Shoemaker and Hackman, 1962). Stratigraphy is the study of the spatial distribution, chronologic relations, and formative processes of layered rocks. Its application to the Moon came relatively late and met resistance, but the fundamental stratigraphic approach (Albritton, 1963) was, in fact, readily transferable to the partly familiar, partly exotic deposits visible on the lunar surface (Mutch, 1970; Wilhelms, 1970b).
Stratigraphic methods were applied systematically during the 1960’s in a program of geologic mapping that aimed at reconstructing the evolution of the Moon’s nearside (McCauley, 1967b; Trask, 1969, 1972; Mutch, 1970; Wilhelms, 1970b; Wilhelms and McCauley, 1971). Order was discovered among the seemingly diverse and random landforms of the lunar surface by determining the sequence in which they were emplaced. The stratigraphic sequence and the emplacement processes deduced therefrom provided a framework for exploration by the Apollo program and for the task of analyzing the returned samples. <...>