Moon explosion sparked by meteorite crash on lunar surface
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The moon has a new hole on its surface thanks to a boulder that slammed into it in March, creating the biggest explosion scientists have seen on the moon since they started monitoring it.
The meteorite crashed on March 17, slamming into the lunar surface at a mind-boggling 56,000 miles per hour (90,000 kilometers per hour) and creating a new crater 65 feet wide (20 meters).
The crash sparked a bright flash of light that would have been visible to anyone looking at the moon at the time with the naked eye, NASA scientists say.
Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office said in a statement, "It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before."
NASA astronomers have been monitoring the moon for lunar meteor impacts for the past eight years, and haven't seen anything this powerful before.
Scientists didn't see the impact occur in real time.
It was only when Ron Suggs, an analyst at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., reviewed a video of the bright moon crash recorded by one of the moon monitoring program's 14-inch telescopes that the event was discovered.
"It jumped right out at me, it was so bright," Suggs said.
Scientists deduced the rock had been roughly 1-foot-wide (between 0.3 to 0.4 meters) and weighted about 88 pounds (40 kilograms).
When researchers looked back at their records from March, they found that the moon meteor might not have been an isolated event.
Though Earth's atmosphere protected our planet's surface from being hit by these meteors, the moon has no such luck. Its lack of an atmosphere exposes it to all incoming space rocks.