Every year, earth’s moon gets literally pummelled by tons of rock and dust that leave the multitude of craters we can see from even a modest telescope from earth.  But what happened on December the 12th 2025, was not only picked up and recorded by the 17 inch Armagh Robotic Telescope during a routine sky of the moon’s surface, but was actually observed in real time by Andrew Marshall-Lee, a doctoral student at Armagh Observatory and Planetarium in Northern Ireland, UK. Observations like this are rare indeed, especially as the impact object was thought to only be about the size of a golf ball, perhaps travelling at 78,000 mph.  Ordinarily, so small an object would not have been observed from earth, but when impacting the unilluminated side of a surface with no atmosphere, the kinetic energy would have created large amounts of heat and light, possibly from vaporising some of the lunar surface material. Though the observatory is still investigating the event, the most likely origin of the meteorite is the Geminid meteor shower. Their research is crucial for scientists whose work focuses on how to defend Earth from Catastrophic collisions. 

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Protecting any future Moon structures or space station, let alone future moon walkers, would prove to be a good deal harder that that!  This is especially so, as over the last decade, 300 sites have been plotted by NASA, the most notable of these was on March 17, 2013 when an approximately 40 kilogram boulder impacted the moon, causing a flash of light 10 times brighter than any monitored before. The speed of that object was estimated as being 56,000 mph, creating a crater of about 20 meters.  Remote orbiters and observations continue to capture crucial moon impact data, so as to know where best to site and protect future space projects there.  We await further statistics gleaned from the most recent impact.