Something weird is going down inside the Moon’s biggest crater 👀🌕 NASA wants answers

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]This is a [music] typical crater on the moon. It's here because once upon a time an asteroid crashed right into it. Yep, a lunar crater forms when an asteroid, meteoroid, or a comet slams into the moon's surface. And as you can see, it's happened a lot. But one crater formed in a very different way. But then, how did it form?

[00:00:22]Well, let's rewind a bit. There's a widely accepted hypothesis that the moon itself is a product of collision, just like all these craters. But that collision [music] was way, way tougher.

[00:00:35]It happened over 4 and 1/2 billion years ago when a huge [music] Mars-sized planet called Theia crashed into Earth.

[00:00:43]That event threw a bunch of debris into orbit. Eventually, it came together to form the moon. Now, for a while after that, the moon was basically a giant ball of lava. But because the early moon was very close to Earth, our planet's gravity [music] kept squeezing it, making it even hotter. In the end though, the moon drifted farther away, cooled down, and [music] formed a rocky crust.

[00:01:09]Now, moving on, about 4.3 [music] billion years ago, an asteroid the size of a small country, like Nepal, way bigger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, slammed into the moon's far side. It left an enormous [music] crater called the South Pole-Aitken Basin. It's up to 5 mi deep.