Earth's gravitational pull shrinking the Moon: NASA

Washington: Earth's gravity has influenced the orientation of thousands of faults that form in the lunar surface as the Moon shrinks, NASA has revealed.

After more than six years in orbit, the US space agency's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged nearly three-fourths of the lunar surface at high resolution, allowing the discovery of over 3,000 faults.

These globally distributed faults have emerged as the most common tectonic landform on the moon. An analysis of the orientations of these small scarps yielded a surprising result.

The faults, created as the moon shrinks, are being influenced by an unexpected source --gravitational tidal forces from Earth.

Global contraction alone should generate an array of thrust faults with no particular pattern in the orientations of the faults, because the contracting forces have equal magnitude in all directions.

The gravitational forces the Moon and Sun exert are responsible for Earth’s rising and falling tides. Similarly, Earth’s gravity also exerts forces on the Moon in the form of solid body tides that distort its shape.

The Moon is slowly receding away from Earth and forces build as the Moon’s tidal distortion diminishes with distance and its rotation period slows with time.

The team's modeling shows that the peak stresses are reached when the moon is farthest from Earth in its orbit.

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