Pictures: A Huge Explosion When a Meteor Hits the Moon

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The bright dot is the explosion when a meteor the size of a small boulder hit the moon.

There has been a NASA program in place for the last 8 years that has been in place to monitor for any meteors that may hit the Moon. This is what NASA report after last night's event:

They've just seen the biggest explosion in the history of the program.

"On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before."

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Controllers of NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have been notified of the strike.  The crater could be as wide as 20 meters, which would make it an easy target for LRO the next time the spacecraft passes over the impact site.  Comparing the size of the crater to the brightness of the flash would give researchers a valuable "ground truth" measurement to validate lunar impact models.

Unlike Earth, which has an atmosphere to protect it, the Moon is airless and exposed.  "Lunar meteors" crash into the ground with fair frequency. Since the monitoring program began in 2005, NASA’s lunar impact team has detected more than 300 strikes, most orders of magnitude fainter than the March 17th event.  Statistically speaking, more than half of all lunar meteors come from known meteoroid streams such as the Perseids and Leonids.  The rest are sporadic meteors–random bits of comet and asteroid debris of unknown parentage.

Here's a closer view:

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Here's NASA's video describing the event with some great details in there.