{"id":477959,"date":"2026-06-15T06:12:35","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T06:12:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/477959\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T06:12:35","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T06:12:35","slug":"why-does-one-side-of-the-moon-have-a-lot-of-craters-while-the-other-does-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/477959\/","title":{"rendered":"Why does one side of the Moon have a lot of craters, while the other does not?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\tBack to Article List\t\t<\/p>\n<p>\n\t\t\t\tIt\u2019s possible the Earth-facing side got more large impact basins than the farside in the Moon&#8217;s first few hundred million years.\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\tBy\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.astronomy.com\/author\/astronomystaff\/\" title=\"Posts by Astronomy Staff\" class=\"author url fn\" rel=\"author nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Astronomy Staff<\/a><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t | <\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\tPublished: June 8, 2026<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t| Last updated on June 10, 2026\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1440\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/ASY-SK0626_02.jpg\" class=\"attachment-large size-large wp-post-image\" alt=\"Side-by-side grayscale comparison of the Moon's two hemispheres. The left image shows the familiar near side of the Moon, featuring large dark volcanic plains called maria that give it a distinctive mottled appearance. The right image shows the far side of the Moon, which lacks significant maria and instead appears more uniformly cratered and bright, with prominent crater ray systems radiating outward from impact sites.\"\/><\/p>\n<p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\tViews of the Moon\u2019s nearside and farside were taken by NASA\u2019s Clementine in 1994. The orbiter used the same camera and filter for both sides, highlighting their differences. Credit: NASA\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Why does one side of the Moon have a lot of craters, while the other side does not?<\/p>\n<p>Stephen Loges<br \/>Brooksville, Florida<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When the first photos of the Moon\u2019s farside were obtained, people usually expressed the difference between the back and the front in terms of \u201cmore craters on the back.\u201d It might be better to express it as \u201cmore lava plains on the front.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like the craters on the farside, the lava plains (called maria) were formed by impacts \u2014 in fact, some of the largest the Moon has ever suffered \u2014 mostly early in its history. These impacts formed huge basins that penetrated to great depths where the Moon\u2019s materials were molten, so that lava, darker in tone than surface rocks, erupted and filled up the floors of all these structures.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Probably the largest of these is the North Polar Basin on the Moon\u2019s back side. It\u2019s so old that its rim features and lava floor have been mostly destroyed by later craters. A similarly old, eroded giant basin is Oceanus Procellarum on the front side. It was later almost demolished by the more recent, but still early, giant Imbrium impact basin, whose samples date at 3.8 billion to 3.9 billion years old \u2014 only 600 million years after the formation of the solar system\u2019s planetary bodies. The prominent Mare Imbrium lavas flooded Imbrium\u2019s floor mostly about 2 billion to 3.8 billion years ago \u2014 though some interesting sampled lava eruptions there have been estimated to have ages as young as 1 billion years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Those ancient lava plains suggest it\u2019s possible that the Earth-facing side actually got more of the large impact basins than the farside in those first few hundred million years. The Moon was closer to Earth in the early millennia, and Earth-passing asteroids might have been deflected by Earth\u2019s gravity and attracted by the Moon\u2019s gravity, crashing into the Earth-facing side of the Moon.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">William K. Hartmann<br \/>Senior Scientist Emeritus,<br \/>Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back to Article List It\u2019s possible the Earth-facing side got more large impact basins than the farside in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[132186,273,4974,111,43,139,69,147,8949],"class_list":["post-477959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ask-astro","tag-environment","tag-magazine","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-the-moon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}