The crater is 225 meters wide, a size expected only once every 139 years
A unique crater has formed on the moon, right under our noses. Routine search of images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera found a new crater as wide as two American football fieldsplanetary 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 benchmarks, a crater this large is expected to form only once every 139 years. This discovery may help highlight the risks the impacts pose to future astronauts.
One of the first craters spotted by the orbiter after its mission began in 2009 was 70 meters wide, said Robinson, of Houston-based spaceflight company Intuitive Machines. “I used to joke with people… that now that the bar is set, we need to find a 100-meter crater,” he said. “Now, lo and behold, we have 225 yards.”
The crater appears to have formed on a boundary between cratered and rugged lunar highlands and a broad, flat mare, formed from liquid magma accumulated on the surface of the moon. Its depth, about 43 meters on average, and its steep edges suggest that it formed in a resistant material like solidified lava. But its shape is slightly elongated, suggesting that the ground beneath the crater is not the same, Robinson said.
The crater is also surrounded by a bright ejecta blanket — rocks and dust that flew in all directions at the moment of impact — and which extend for hundreds of meters from the edge. Robinson and his colleagues found other disturbances up to 120 kilometers from the crater.
This could be bad news for future lunar bases. Pieces of rock ejected during impacts could hit lunar habitats at high speed and at very great distances. Buildings will need to be designed to survive this. “You need to protect your assets to withstand small particles hitting you at a rate of a kilometer per second,” Robinson said.