Video Shows Meteoroid Hitting the Moon
"There’s a new crater on the Moon. It’s about 14 meters wide, 3 meters deep and precisely one month, [sixteen] days old," NASA reports:
NASA astronomers watched it form: "On May 2, 2006, a meteoroid hit the Moon’s Sea of Clouds (Mare Nubium) with 17 billion joules of kinetic energy—that’s about the same as 4 tons of TNT," says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL. "The impact created a bright fireball which we video-recorded using a 10-inch telescope."
Lunar impacts have been seen before–"stuff hits the Moon all the time," notes Cooke–but this is the best-ever recording of an explosion in progress.
"The video plays in 7x slow motion; otherwise the explosion would be nearly invisible to the human eye. "The duration of the fireball was only four-tenths of a second," says Cooke.
