This asteroid put a new dent in the moon.
(Credit: University of Huelva)
The prevalence of loud action movies shows just how much humans enjoy a good explosion. You won’t find many bigger than what happened on the moon in September last year. Footage of an 880-pound asteroid smashing onto the lunar surface was just released, showing a bright flash at the impact site.
The evidence was captured by telescopes as part of a moon-impact monitoring project run by astronomers at the University of Huelva in Spain. A paper about the event was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The impact makes NASA’s video of a boulder-sized meteroid crashing into the moon early last year look like a hiccup in comparison. That impact rocked the lunar surface to the equivalent of about 5 tons of TNT. The more recent crash landing hit with the force of around 15 tons of TNT. Kaboom.
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