It’s so big we can see it with a telescope, and so small that the chance of something similar hitting any single spot on the surface minuscule in the next 100 years.
Basically, moon bases need to be underground to prevent micrometeoroids from messing them up, and any bigger impact like this is going to wipe out anything we build, even underground.
All the more reason Earth is pretty awesome!
Fun fact: moon regolith is made of ~45% oxygen, so in a roundabout way digging underground is kind of like having an atmosphere.
or just build it on the earth facing side of the moon , then you have the entire thickness of the moon shielding you. But I believe some of the more interesting use cases for lunar bases require the far side, notably telescopes
In some more enlightened timeline there's a spirited competition between institutional and amateur astronomers towards predicting these, and some amateur is sitting on a $10M this-person-told-us-so-and-we-bet-against-them prize, which gets bigger every year (no prizes for the institutional side, they get a salary).
In that timeline's future we're then competing over who can most reliably prevent them.
The winners of such frivolous competitions over protecting the moon get funding for the more serious job of protecting Earth.
I don't even get that far but get a blank page except for: "Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker." They're doing a pretty good job of minimizing their traffic.
Does anyone really want to live on the moon? I mean it's a cool and dreamy idea but would you actually do it?
> a whopping 728 feet across, more than twice the length of an American football field
For the rest of the world, this is ~222 meters, more than twice the length of a 100 meter track.
EDIT: Ninja'd! :-)
It’s so big we can see it with a telescope, and so small that the chance of something similar hitting any single spot on the surface minuscule in the next 100 years.
Archive: https://archive.ph/88rlJ
Basically, moon bases need to be underground to prevent micrometeoroids from messing them up, and any bigger impact like this is going to wipe out anything we build, even underground.
All the more reason Earth is pretty awesome!
Fun fact: moon regolith is made of ~45% oxygen, so in a roundabout way digging underground is kind of like having an atmosphere.
or just build it on the earth facing side of the moon , then you have the entire thickness of the moon shielding you. But I believe some of the more interesting use cases for lunar bases require the far side, notably telescopes
Or you need really good asteroid defenses.
that's basically what the moon is for us for most sizes of asteroid (minus very large world ending ones)
Crazy that space is just full of high speed rocks flying around all the time.
In some more enlightened timeline there's a spirited competition between institutional and amateur astronomers towards predicting these, and some amateur is sitting on a $10M this-person-told-us-so-and-we-bet-against-them prize, which gets bigger every year (no prizes for the institutional side, they get a salary).
In that timeline's future we're then competing over who can most reliably prevent them.
The winners of such frivolous competitions over protecting the moon get funding for the more serious job of protecting Earth.
You could create a lunar grid on a betting market with yes/no contracts for impacts above a certain threshold.
As with Mars (and Silo) we need a very deep pit to protect humans from the radiation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/science/space/what-a-mass...
Eh, still have to login.
I don't even get that far but get a blank page except for: "Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker." They're doing a pretty good job of minimizing their traffic.
I can only get you so far...
No,
You could have gotten this link: https://archive.is/88rlJ
(which is currently also the top link)
Bypass Paywalls Clean on Quetta works fine.
NASA
free to view, you already paid for it
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/moon/nasas-moon-orbite...
More photos in one of the papers mentioned,
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeh7812
It means someone will ask 10x price for building the US lunar base.
> previously unseen lunar crater that’s a whopping 728 feet across, more than twice the length of an American football field.
For the rest of the world, it's about 222m.
> objects the size of monster truck tires
FFS, just use metric! Apparently that's about 1.7m.
But how many Chevy Tahoes across is it? How many cases of Budweiser high? Speak to me in units I can understand, dammit!
We can always translate to baguettes, Fiat 500s, and Oktoberfest steins for our European friends.