(obsolete)
History of Nomenclature
The term was introduced for large unflooded basins on the far side of the Moon by Lipskiy (1965) who analyzed Zond-3 photographs. Since all prominent basins are flooded by lava (mare) on the nearside, unflooded basins were first seen on the spacecraft images of the farside of the Moon. The term was originally coined by the Russian astronomer Yuri Pavlovich Pskovsky (Vasilyevich 2011) and was used only during the Soviet Moon Program (1965–1974). Thalassoid as a generic term was rejected in 1967 because these features were not distinguishable from other unflooded, ordinary basins (Perek 1968; Hartmann and Wood 1971), but the debate on thalassoids helped decouple the concept of basins from their lava fill (Hartman and Kuiper 1962; Hartmann 1981).
Prominent Example
Korolev, Moon (Fig. 1)
The first image of Korolev (arrow), a basin without lava cover. Zond-3 (1965, USSR)
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References
Hartman WK (1981) Discovery of multi-ring basins: gestalt perception in planetary science. In: Schultz PH, Merrill RB (eds) Multi-ring basins, vol 12A, Proceedings of lunar and planetary science. Pergamon Press, New York, pp 79–90
Hartman WK, Kuiper GP (1962) Concentric structures surrounding lunar basins. Commun Lunar Planet Lab 1:51–66
Hartmann W, Wood C (1971) Moon: Origin and evolution of multi-ring basins. Moon, 3(1):3–78.
Lipskiy Yu N (1965) Zond-3 photographs of the moon’s far side. Sky Telesc 30:338–341
Perek L (ed) (1968) In: Perek L (ed) Proceedings of the thirteenth general assembly of IAU (Prague 1967). Transactions of the IAU vol XIII B. Association of University for Research in Astronomy, Washington, DC
Vasilyevich MA (2011) History of astronomy. Chapter 23. [In Russian]. http://www.astro.websib.ru/astro/23/Glava23. Accessed 12 Oct 2011
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Shevchenko, V.V. (2014). Thalassoid. In: Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9213-9_367-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9213-9_367-1
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