
Record-Breaking Meteorite Crash on Moon - anigbrowl
http://www.space.com/24789-moon-meteorite-impact-brightest-lunar-explosion.html
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danbruc
Blowing up 15 tons of TNT on the moon is visible from the earth - I would not
have expected that. And now I wonder what a Tsar Bomba like bomb - 50,000,000+
tons of TNT equivalent - on the moon would look like.

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mbenjaminsmith
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119)

We almost found out. As insane as that plan was, it was relatively sane
compared to this, and similar, tests:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime)

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russell
There is speculation that the crater Giordano Bruno was caused by a large
impact on the moon in 1178. If true, it would have been way larger, but
evidence of any debris hitting the earth is missing, so it's probably just a
nice story.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno_%28crater%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno_%28crater%29)

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cjfont
Any reason this was unveiled 5 months after it happened?

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a3n
Possibly it took almost that long before someone viewed it or it was otherwise
analyzed. The data pile is large.

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altero
It is interesting to compare energy released by meteors to bombs. This meteor
was about 1 meter in diameter, and made 40m crater. The biggest artificial
explosion made crater 500 meter wide crater. Mosquito bite compared to bit
larger asteroid.

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spodek
> "Record-Breaking Meteorite Crash on Moon Sparks Brightest Lunar Explosion
> Ever"

Did they mean "... ever recorded?" I'm sure there were brighter crashes in the
past four billion years, many of which humans saw.

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ChuckMcM
Of course they did :-) It must have been exciting when that first year they
started recording temperatures, every day was the hottest and coldest it had
ever been on that day, just one record after the next, falling like raindrops.

I was somewhat amused that 'imaging the dark side and recording flashes' was a
fairly recent idea. But we have gotten much better about being able to just
throw a few multimegapixel imagers around for doing things like that of late.

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ChuckMcM
Better link to the video
[http://youtu.be/kuLzjwkXxZw?t=2m50s](http://youtu.be/kuLzjwkXxZw?t=2m50s)
from youtube without the annoying space.com monetization

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deletes
How would a potential base on the moon defend against that?

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centralwinger
I'd expect that it's such a rare and localized event that you probably
wouldn't prepare for it.

But, wouldn't less meteorite crashes happen at the poles? Would that be the
safest base location?

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cgrubb
It doesn't look like there are fewer craters at the north pole:

[http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2011/09/lunar...](http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2011/09/lunar-
north-pole-craters-lro-nasa.jpg)

