Image credit: James Stuby/NASA/ASU

As part of a short retrospective on the large influence that Dr. Paul Spudis had on the field of planetary geology, we felt that a look back at some of his more influential papers would be appropriate. One such work, published in Science in 1994, looked at altimetry data obtained from the Clementine mission. Altimetry data measure the height of an object and were used by Clementine to find large multi-ring basins (larger than 600 km) on the Moon that had been nearly “obliterated” by later impactors. These basins were previously undetected using just visible images and at the time were found to be some of the largest, deepest impact basins in the solar system. This article has been cited over 140 times and, to this day, continues to be cited.

For more information, visit: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/266/5192/1848.long