This animation, made from images taken by the Advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE) on board ESA's SMART-1 spacecraft, shows a feature characterized by bright albedo, and called Reiner Gamma Formation.

The Reiner Gamma Formation, a totally flat area consisting of much brighter material than the surrounding dark 'mare', is centred on an area located at 57.8° West, 8.1° North, in the Oceanus Procellarum on the near (visible) side of the Moon, and has an extension of approximately 30 by 60 kilometres.

The AMIE camera obtained the images on 14 January 2006, from a distance between 1599 and 1688 kilometres and with a ground resolution between 144 and 153 metres per pixel.

From early ground-based observations, this feature was initially misidentified as a crater. Only later detailed observations from orbit (such as those performed by USSR's Zond-6, and NASA's Lunar Orbiter, Apollo and Clementine missions) revealed its true nature: a very unusual morphology, consisting of swirl-like patterns that do not correspond to any topographic features.

Its main part consists of a bright pattern of elliptical shape, located to the west of Reiner crater. Bright elongated patches extend to the northeast in the Marius Hills region and small swirls extend to the southwest. The origin of the Reiner Gamma Formation and other swirls occurring on the lunar surface is still unclear.

Lunar swirls are associated with magnetic anomalies and some of these swirls – such as Mare Ingenii and Mare Marginis – are 'antipodal' to large impact structures (that is they are located right into opposite regions of the Moon globe).

So, it was suggested that the Reiner Gamma swirls correspond to magnetized materials in the crust or iron-rich ejecta materials able to deflect the solar wind (constant flow of charged particles coming from the Sun). This would prevent surface materials to undergo maturation processes, and so produce an optical anomaly.

However, Reiner Gamma Formation still stands as a particular case. In fact, the magnetic anomaly does not correlate with the scale of the lunar crust structure and large-scale anomalies seen on the far side. Furthermore, the anomaly is not associated with any obvious antipodal basin structure, and the surface material related to Reiner Gamma appears optically very immature (the age for its emplacement could be quite recent).

Reiner Gamma Formation