25 kilometers in diameter Huge asteroid tore gorges into the far side of the moon

A celestial body with a diameter of 25 kilometers hit the moon with enormous force and left traces that are still visible today. For Nasa, the location of the impact is good news.

An asteroid impact billions of years ago left two enormous canyons on the side of the moon facing away from the Earth. This was the conclusion reached by American and British researchers who analyzed photos and data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

They mapped the impact area and calculated the path of the debris that caused these canyons around 3.8 billion years ago. They published the results of their work in the journal "Nature Communications", which appeared on Tuesday.

"Very dramatic geological process"

"This was a very violent, a very dramatic geological process," said lead author David Kring from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. According to the research, the space rock flew over the south pole of the moon before it hit. This created a huge basin and a stream of boulders that hit the moon at a speed of almost one kilometer per second. The debris dug two canyons the size of the Grand Canyon in the US state of Arizona into the ground in just ten minutes.

Kring and his team estimate that the asteroid had a diameter of 25 kilometers. The energy required to create the two canyons was probably more than 130 times greater than the current stockpile of nuclear weapons worldwide. Most of the ejected debris was hurled away from the moon's south pole, as Kring explained.

Good news for Nasa

This is good news for scientists and the US space agency Nasa, which wants to land astronauts at the south pole on the side of the moon facing the Earth. This was left untouched by the impact and older rocks can therefore be found there in their original state. These older rocks may help to shed light not only on the origins of the moon, but also those of the Earth.

Kring said it is unclear whether the two canyons are permanently in shadow like some of the craters at the moon's south pole. "That's something we'll definitely look into again," he said. The permanently shadowed areas of the moon are thought to contain large amounts of ice that could be converted into rocket fuel and drinking water by future visitors to the moon.

Nasa's "Artemis" program, the successor to "Apollo", is to take astronauts to the moon before the end of this decade. The plan is to send astronauts around the moon next year and, around a year later, to land humans on the moon again for the first time since the Apollo missions.