Posted on 03/24/2026 6:49:22 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
A once-in-a-century crater formed on the moon right under our noses. A routine search of images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera found a fresh crater as wide as two American football fields, planetary scientist Mark Robinson reported March 17 at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Meeting in The Woodlands, Texas.
The crater is 225 meters wide and formed in April or May 2024, Robinson said. According to predictions based on other lunar landmarks, a crater that big should form only once in 139 years. The discovery can help highlight the risks impacts pose to future astronauts.
One of the first craters the orbiter spotted after it began its mission in 2009 was 70 meters wide, said Robinson, of Houston-based spaceflight company Intuitive Machines. “I used to joke with folks … that now the bar has been set, you have to find a 100-meter crater,” he said. “Now, lo and behold, we have 225 meters.”
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
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Save s—t that came down over Ohio ? Maybe multiple asteroids or meteors that earth passed thru a few days ago.
Cool.
Astronomy Picture of the Day 2019 January 25.
Too bad all of the Apollo seismometers are inactive.
I saw video of something hitting the moon not too long ago.
Not sure 225 meters wide qualifies as “massive”. Copernicus is 93 KM wide. Nearby Pytheas is ~20 KM wide. THOSE are “massive”.
I’m more concerned about a massive new crater on Earth or a hole in my roof, ceilings and floors when I’m home. It’s either better reporting of these things or there’s been a bit more activity lately.
I thought so, too, until it said 2024. By the way, there have been two in Michigan, one yesterday, besides the Ohio and Houston ones. Might be a linear, orbital debris field the earth is moving through.
How did they come up with the figure of once every 139 years?
So an asteroid big enough to cause that much damage went undetected by us in the last 15 years and we’re only finding the evidence of its impact on the moon now?
That’s not very comforting.
Boring Company stock....
Neato. I wonder what they’ll name it…
Asteroid 2024 YR4, a space rock roughly 60 meters (200 feet) wide, has a roughly 4% chance of colliding with the Moon on December 22, 2032.
Maybe it’s like a crop circle. Someone on the moon with a Bobcat made it. Just to mess with us.
I wonder what an impact of that magnitude does to the rotation and position of the moon. I think the Copernicus crater would be equivalent to a 200 mile crater on earth.
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