There’s at least one SF novel I recall reading where a massive impact on the Moon emperils imperils (sp?) our Earth.

That one novel that I was thinking of there is written by Jack McDevitt in in 1998 and is titled Moonfall :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_McDevitt

The novel had a wikipage of its own once but that was sadly deleted, dunno why. (Hate it when that happens.) A good albeit far-fetched read that I’d recommend and rate reasonably high.

Got vague memories of the BA basting a (totally unrelated?) bad B-grade movie featuring that scenario too, but might just be mistaken.

Aha! Success at last!

Searching for a BA blog piece on le impacts Leonid la Lune found me this one :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2005/12/23/meteorite-hits-the-moon/

from wa-aay back when & this more recent post :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/03/19/lunar-meteor-impact-on-video/

Which both answer (#33) The Big Blue Frog’s question pretty well.

BTW. typing into Google images got translated to :

Did you mean: Leonard hitting Moon – bad astronomy blog?

Hah! Poor Leonard – ouch!

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/ast03nov99_1/

for one NASA project spotting Leonid metorite impacts on the Moon complete with extra links from there. I thought I remembered the Bad Astronomer writing something about this too but can’t seem to find it.

Plus here :

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=21397

For some tentative conclusions suggesting the Moon is struck more often than we used to think!

Finally, see here :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_meteorite

For the wikipedia page on Lunar meteorites.

As always, I hope these are interesting / useful for y’all.

So, Phil. Why aren’t we seeing collisions with the Moon these days? Is it just because any comets or meteoroids big enough have already been cleared out? We always talk about what a big asteroid impact would do to the Earth, but what would be the effects on Earth of a large impact to the Moon?

Well the Moon is a fair way away and makes a relatively small target but I think Luna still gets hit from time to time even today.

There’s at least one SF novel I recall reading where a massive impact on the Moon emperils our Earth.

Also pretty sure we know of lunar metorites – rocks blasted off the Moon by impacts – that are of varying ages too.

Just noticed – on the full image, you can see there’s a long windy wiggly linear feature to the right of the central crater at about three o’clock, leading up to the dark patch at the top right. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was a dry watercourse. But since it’s not, what is it??

My guess would be an ancient river – of molten lava!

In Other Words, a lava tube that has collapsed or just where the darker maria basalts once flowed. Mind you, I’m not 100% sure of that or that I’ve found the feature you’re talking about.

I was hoping that meteor a couple years ago would hit Mars so we could see an impact on a rocky world.

To be fair, astronomy has no shortage of ragged ring shapes, so that sort of thing is going to be more or less inevitable

That is one impressive crater though.

Glad someone else can see the chocobo too though.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/forever-alone

Kinda fits. The moon’s just floating out there, a quarter million miles from civilization…forever alone…

The alleged 1178 impact creating the crater Giordano Bruno would have looked like the apocalypse to us on Earth, which is why this event likely didn’t happen. Paul Withers (then at UA Lunar and Planetary Lab) investigated further and found:

“The impact would have launched 10 million tons of ejecta into the Earth’s atmosphere in the following week, previous studies have shown”

“I calculate that this would cause a week-long meteor storm comparable to the peak of the 1966 Leonids,” he said. Ten million tons of rock showering the entire Earth as pieces of ejecta about a centimeter across (inch-sized fragments) for a week is equivalent to 50,000 meteors each hour.”[!!!]

“And they would be very bright, very easy to see, at magnitude 1 or magnitude 2. It would have been a spectacular sight to see! Everyone around the world would have had the opportunity to see the best fireworks show in history,”

Of course “….no vigilant 12th century sky watcher reported such a storm.”

If true, though, it would have looked AWESOME.

ref: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast26apr_1/
(and see links at page bottom)

Abstract of Withers 2001 paper in Meteoritics: http://www.uark.edu/~meteor/abst36-4.html

I hope you’re trolling right now.

http://twitpic.com/4g73yy