The surface of the Moon seems eternal. There’s no air or water to reshape it, and no plate tectonics to jiggle things around. But the Moon does change – sometimes in a hurry. Scientists recently discovered an impact crater that’s almost 750 feet in diameter. It had been gouged during the spring of 2024.
The crater was found in images snapped by L-R-O – Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The craft’s been mapping the lunar surface for years. It’s photographed almost all of the surface many times. Scientists compare images taken at different times to see how things have changed.
The new impact crater was the biggest change seen so far. The crater is three times wider than any other crater gouged during LRO’s time in orbit. It’s about 150 feet deep, and its rim rises more than 25 feet above the surrounding landscape. The impact blasted out boulders as big as houses. And bright “rays” of smaller bits of debris were splashed far from the crater’s edge. Such a powerful impact on Earth could level a city, and kill everything within miles of the impact site.
Some good-sized pieces of debris from the crater’s formation could have traveled dozens of miles – something for designers of lunar habitats to keep in mind.
The scientists who reported the discovery say that such a large crater should form about once every 140 years. So LRO recorded a rare major change on our satellite world.
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