Surface & Geology
Spin the globe, then explore the craters, lava plains and caves of the Moon, with photos from Apollo, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Artemis II.
NASA, Artemis II crew (art002e012228), 6 Apr 2026. Public domain.
Drag the globe (or use the arrow keys) to turn it. Tap a crater card below to fly to it.
Map: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio, CGI Moon Kit (LRO camera colour mosaic), public domain. The colours are boosted slightly so the dark seas stand out.
A young, sharp crater 85 km across, only about 108 million years old. Its bright rays of splashed debris stretch across much of the near side and are easy to see at full moon. Sunrise here lights its 2 km central peak, topped by a boulder about 120 m across.
A 93 km crater about 800 million years old, often called the "monarch of the Moon". Its terraced walls slumped inward after the impact, and its floor is full of hills and cracked melt rock.
Hadley Rille winds along the foot of the Apennine Mountains. It is a collapsed channel that once carried flowing lava. The Apollo 15 crew drove their rover to its rim in 1971.
At Shorty crater, geologist-astronaut Harrison Schmitt spotted orange soil. It turned out to be tiny glass beads from a fire-fountain volcanic eruption about 3.6 billion years ago.
A hole about 65 m wide, found by Japan's Kaguya orbiter in 2009. It is thought to be a skylight into a lava tube, a natural tunnel that could one day shelter explorers.
A bullseye of rings about 950 km across, on the western edge of the near side. It is one of the youngest and best-preserved giant impact basins. Artemis II astronauts photographed it in April 2026.
Early astronomers thought the dark patches were seas, so they named them maria (Latin for "seas"; one is a mare). They are really vast plains of solidified basalt lava, which welled up mostly 3 to 3.9 billion years ago and flooded huge impact basins. They cover about 16% of the Moon's surface, almost all on the near side.
The bright highlands are older, rougher and saturated with craters. They are made of anorthosite, the pale rock that floated to the top of the magma ocean when the Moon was young (see Birth of the Moon).
Craters stay sharp for a very long time because the Moon has no wind, rain, plate tectonics or plants to wear them away. Only new impacts, the solar wind and the slow rain of micrometeorites change the surface.
Almost the whole Moon is covered in regolith: a layer of rock fragments, glass beads and powder made by billions of years of meteorite impacts. It is roughly 4 to 5 m deep on the maria and 10 to 15 m deep in the highlands.
The fine dust is not like sand on Earth. Nothing has rounded its edges, so the grains are sharp and jagged. It clings to everything, scratched the astronauts' visors and seals, and Apollo 17's Harrison Schmitt described an allergy-like "lunar hay fever" from breathing it in the cabin.
When rivers of lava flowed across the young Moon, the outside sometimes cooled into a roof while hot lava kept flowing underneath, leaving a hollow tunnel called a lava tube. In the Moon's low gravity, these tubes could be much larger than those on Earth.
Orbiters have found more than 200 pits, some of which look like collapsed holes in tube roofs, including pits in the Marius Hills and the Sea of Tranquillity. In 2024, a team led by Leonardo Carrer and Lorenzo Bruzzone reanalysed radar data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and found evidence of a cave passage leading sideways from the bottom of the Sea of Tranquillity pit, the first strong evidence of an accessible cave on the Moon.
Caves could shield future astronauts from radiation, small meteorites and the huge temperature swings at the surface.
With no air to hold or move heat around, the surface swings wildly between day and night. Near the poles, the Sun always stays low, and the floors of some deep craters have not seen sunlight for billions of years. In 2009, LRO's Diviner instrument measured about 26 kelvin (−247 °C) in Hermite crater near the north pole, among the coldest temperatures ever measured in the solar system. These "cold traps" hold water ice, which is one reason NASA's Artemis program is aiming for the south pole.
They are maria: huge plains of dark basalt lava that flooded ancient impact basins, mostly 3 to 3.9 billion years ago. They cover about 16% of the Moon's surface.
It has been hit by asteroids and comets for over 4 billion years, and with no air, water, weather or plate tectonics, the craters are not worn away the way they are on Earth.
The South Pole–Aitken basin on the far side, about 2,500 km across and one of the largest known impact structures in the solar system.
Regolith: broken rock, glass beads and fine powder made by billions of years of impacts. Its grains are sharp and jagged because there is no wind or water to round them.
About +120 °C at midday near the equator and about −130 °C at night. Shadowed polar craters can drop to about −247 °C.
Very likely. Orbiters have photographed pits that may be skylights into lava tubes, and in 2024 radar data showed evidence of a cave passage under a pit in the Sea of Tranquillity.
Photos credited to NASA, NOAA and other public-domain sources are used with thanks; BotBuhdy adds a small botbuhdy.com mark. Pictures labelled AI-generated illustration are artist-style illustrations made for this page, not photographs.
