9 comments

  • Kirr 40 minutes ago
    > a whopping 728 feet across, more than twice the length of an American football field

    For the rest of the world, this is ~222 meters, more than twice the length of a 100 meter track.

    EDIT: Ninja'd! :-)

    • kurthr 5 minutes ago
      It’s so big we can see it with a telescope, and so small that the chance of something similar hitting any single spot on the surface minuscule in the next 100 years.
  • npunt 11 minutes ago
    Basically, moon bases need to be underground to prevent micrometeoroids from messing them up, and any bigger impact like this is going to wipe out anything we build, even underground.

    All the more reason Earth is pretty awesome!

    Fun fact: moon regolith is made of ~45% oxygen, so in a roundabout way digging underground is kind of like having an atmosphere.

  • JKCalhoun 53 minutes ago
  • __MatrixMan__ 45 minutes ago
    In some more enlightened timeline there's a spirited competition between institutional and amateur astronomers towards predicting these, and some amateur is sitting on a $10M this-person-told-us-so-and-we-bet-against-them prize, which gets bigger every year (no prizes for the institutional side, they get a salary).

    In that timeline's future we're then competing over who can most reliably prevent them.

    The winners of such frivolous competitions over protecting the moon get funding for the more serious job of protecting Earth.

  • bigtech 16 minutes ago
    As with Mars (and Silo) we need a very deep pit to protect humans from the radiation.
  • bookofjoe 1 day ago
    • egberts1 1 day ago
      Eh, still have to login.
      • somenameforme 1 hour ago
        I don't even get that far but get a blank page except for: "Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker." They're doing a pretty good job of minimizing their traffic.
      • b0ner_t0ner 46 minutes ago
        Bypass Paywalls Clean on Quetta works fine.
      • bookofjoe 8 hours ago
        I can only get you so far...
  • metalman 1 day ago
  • zx8080 1 hour ago
    It means someone will ask 10x price for building the US lunar base.
  • mkl 43 minutes ago
    > previously unseen lunar crater that’s a whopping 728 feet across, more than twice the length of an American football field.

    For the rest of the world, it's about 222m.

    > objects the size of monster truck tires

    FFS, just use metric! Apparently that's about 1.7m.

    • lubujackson 3 minutes ago
      But how many Chevy Tahoes across is it? How many cases of Budweiser high? Speak to me in units I can understand, dammit!