Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

One Giant Impact Made the Two Halves of the Moon so Different

Global map of the Moon, as seen from the Clementine mission, showing the lunar near- and farside. If we're going back to the Moon, we'll need a Lunar GPS. Credit: NASA.

The South Pole-Aitken Basin on the Moon formed from a gigantic impact about 4.3 billion years ago. But that impact may have changed everything about the Moon, and explain why the lunar farside looks so different from the nearside, the side we see from Earth.

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