Space Weather News for Sept. 18, 2026

A NEW CRATER ON THE MOON:  In 2024, a 600-ton comet or asteroid hit the Moon and
exploded like an atomic bomb. Remarkably, no one noticed until a year and a half
later, when NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter found a huge hole in the ground.
How could we miss such an event?  

The impact should have produced a flash as bright as Venus, yet no one saw it.
LRO looked at the impact site on April 11, 2024--there was nothing. It looked
again on May 22, 2024 and saw a 220 meter hole in the ground. Sometime between
those two dates a 6.5 × 10¹⁰ kJ explosion occurred.

The answer could be as simple as sunlight. For most (64%) of the 6 weeks between
the two LRO snapshots, the sun was shining over the crash site. No flash shows
against such intensely sunlit ground. Also, one of the most active lunar impact
observatories (ESA's NELIOTA) was off-line in 2024, so the odds of detection
during the lunar night were sharply reduced.  	

Full story @ Spaceweather.com. 
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