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.
Put a chewing gum in it, push a coin or credit card atop it, for a fast fix. Use Fantastic Fast Foam by Lunar Meta Materials for more permanent repair.
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
The lunar near side is not shielded from impact craters in any significant way. Impactors can cross the earth's orbit and hit the near side of the moon just as easily as they can hit the far side.
The fact that the near side appears to have large areas with few craters, and the far side doesn't, is a result of many near-side craters having been erased by lava flows. It's not because it received fewer impacts.
I like your reasoning about oxygen and would like to contribute the factoid that the molecular weight of CO₂ is over 72% oxygen. We really need to be spewing more of this stuff into the atmosphere to improve its oxygenation. Obviously O₂ would be best, but CO₂ is much more practical, and still gets us 72%.
> basically what the moon is for us for most sizes of asteroid
Popular myth. "While the Moon does undeniably experience asteroid impacts, these impacts do not proportionally alleviate the impact risk to Earth; instead, both celestial bodies are subject to independent and interconnected bombardment" [1].
The article says a new crater this size is expected about once every 132 years. Presumably, smaller craters are more frequent. So what's the approximate size of the largest crater that you'd expect, say, in an average year? And would it be scientifically useful to design a mission around sending a rover to explore one of those brand-new craters?
Just build right there in that crater. Like lightning, a meteor rarely strikes the same place twice. It's a statistical law, independent random events be damned! :)
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.
Life on the moon is likely to develop in much the same way that humans settled in far-flung places on Earth. The first people to arrive and live on the moon will be there for a work-related reason (research, military posting, etc.). Those people will settle down, have families and form a community. Over time, the communities will grow and evolve into a distinct Moon culture and society.
I feel it has in the sense there is an established culture in some major Antarctic research bases. There are stories, communities, and shared history. But most of those on the ice come home after a season or two, so there's no long term settlement of individual families. Maybe this would also be true of moon bases. Researchers stay for some time, then take the next available ferry home once their season lapses. There would have to be significant infrastructure to make "ordinary" life possible over the long term - schools, hospitals, non-research jobs - reasons for staying there versus migrating back to Earth.
FWIW, there's a nice series of posts about life on the ice here: https://brr.fyi/
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.
The crater is small enough that it is probably not obvious to spot visually.
But I'm surprised that we missed noticing an impact event of that size when it happened, or even the space object of that size.
For the rest of the world, this is ~222 meters, more than twice the length of a 100 meter track.
EDIT: Ninja'd! :-)
At 20km/s, that's plenty big enough to ruin your day.
Is it though? That's pretty slow
Edit: nvm I read as km/h not km/s
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.
The fact that the near side appears to have large areas with few craters, and the far side doesn't, is a result of many near-side craters having been erased by lava flows. It's not because it received fewer impacts.
Popular myth. "While the Moon does undeniably experience asteroid impacts, these impacts do not proportionally alleviate the impact risk to Earth; instead, both celestial bodies are subject to independent and interconnected bombardment" [1].
[1] https://iere.org/does-the-moon-protect-the-earth-from-astero...
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.
FWIW, there's a nice series of posts about life on the ice here: https://brr.fyi/
https://www.wiffa.aq/?hl=en-GB
Edit: Check out John Wiff
Also, this is how I imagine people will be spending their time on the moon.
old world exploration was caused/fueled/triggered/made-possible by opportunity and commerce.
I.e. basically not at all.
You could have gotten this link: https://archive.is/88rlJ
(which is currently also the top link)
Or one hiroshima bomb. Oh wait, nobody to scare here, move along
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.
free to view, you already paid for it
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/moon/nasas-moon-orbite...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeh7812