Sometime in late spring 2024, something slammed into the moon. That isn’t an especially rare phenomenon. It happens more often than you think, and it looks far less spectacular than those AI slop videos on your iPhone. However, this particular impact was spotted by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Even better, it captured some before-and-after images of the impact area.
What they found was a very noticeable, very fresh crater about 738 feet wide and 141 feet deep, a whole three times larger than the previous largest impact crater ever observed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter since it was launched in 2009.
The Moon’s Got a New Crater, and NASA Has the Before and After Pictures to Prove It
While lunar impacts happen occasionally, impacts of this scale only happen once every 139 years in a given area of the moon. Spotting this one almost immediately after it warmed, cosmically speaking, was an incredible stroke of luck.
The crater itself is funnel-shaped and surrounded by debris that was flung outward in a pattern that suggests the space rock came in from the south-southwest. Some of the ejected chunks are huge, up to 13 meters across, and are shaped like giant shards of shrapnel that would have torn apart any nearby landers were bases, something future moon colonizing missions are going to have to take into account.
Inside it, scientists spotted a dark, glassy material that formed when the rock partially melted from the heat generated by the impact and then cooled almost instantly. This detail is especially impressive, considering that we almost never get to see craters this size with high-resolution images.
We definitely never get to see before-and-after pictures of the impact site that provide researchers with a clearer understanding of just how devastating a meteor impact can really be.
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