A bright flash lit up Oceanus Procellarum on November 1 at 8:49 p.m. local timeת Japan. “I caught another bright one,” said Daichi Fujii, curator of the Hiratsuka City Museum, according to the New York Times. Two nights earlier, at 8:33 p.m. on October 30, his cameras recorded a similar burst east of the 70-mile-wide Gassendi Crater. Each event lasted about one-tenth of a second and came from meteoroids striking the surface at roughly 96,000 kilometers per hour.
Fujii has monitored the Moon’s night side since 2011 with automated telescopes in Fuji and Hiratsuka that flag sudden flashes. He has logged about 60 impacts, or one every few dozen observation hours. Seeing two in 48 hours was unusual, and he suggested the rocks may have been Taurid meteors from Comet Encke, though he noted that the origin remained unconfirmed.
The October 30 strike likely involved a 200-gram fragment traveling 27 kilometers per second, leaving a three-meter crater. Without an atmosphere to slow or vaporize debris, even small rocks explode on the lunar surface; the same object would have burned up in Earth’s air. “Since the moon has no atmosphere, meteors cannot be seen, and it lights up at the moment a crater is formed,” Fujii wrote on X.
Assisted by a news-analysis system.
Multiple Japanese observatories captured both flashes from different angles. “Those impact flashes seem real,” said Juan Luis Cano of the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre, who added that they appeared brighter than average. ESA telescopes missed the events because the Moon was too bright from Europe, and NASA staff could not comment during a U.S. government shutdown, the New York Times reported, though the agency’s planetary-defense instruments kept operating.
Impact data refine estimates of how often small asteroids strike the Moon, which informs risk calculations for Earth and for future lunar bases. Fujii argued that planned settlements will need adequate shielding.
Tens of thousands of rocks hit the Moon each year, gouging craters from a few meters to several dozen meters across. A five-kilogram meteoroid can create a nine-meter hole and hurl more than 75 tons of regolith into space, NASA said. Because such flashes are visible from Earth, amateur astronomers can add to the growing database.
“I want the public to enjoy science,” said Fujii, who will keep his cameras on the dark crescent as the Taurid shower peaks.
Written with the help of a news-analysis system.