A Rocket Is About to Punch a New Crater on the Moon

Professor Pip adjusted his slightly crooked spectacles and patted the bulging pockets of his forest-green lab coat. "Ah! Precisely what I need," he said, pulling out a shallow wooden tray, a bag of flour, a jar of cocoa powder, and one small smooth pebble.

Mia, Leo, and their friend Asha crowded around a fence post in the meadow. A big pale Moon was climbing up over the trees.

"Tonight, my fellow scientists," Pip announced, his fluffy tail swishing, "a piece of an old rocket is going to plonk right into the Moon. So the question is — what happens when something bumps into a place that has no water, no wind, and no clouds?"

"A really big BONK?" said Leo.

"Something like that!" Pip laughed. He poured the flour into the tray and dusted the top with dark cocoa. "Watch this."

He held the pebble a paw's-length above the tray and let it go. PLOP! A tiny cloud puffed up. And in the flour, a perfect round dip appeared — with pale streaks reaching out from the middle like the arms of a starfish.

"WHOA!" said Mia. "It made a mini Moon-hole!"

"Exactly right," said Pip. "That dip is called a crater. And those pale streaks are called rays — bits of stuff kicked up by the bump. When the rocket piece hits the Moon at 5,000 miles per hour, it'll blast out a crater about the size of a school bus, with rays reaching out much farther than that."

"But wait," Asha said, adjusting her glasses like Pip. "Won't the wind blow it away tomorrow?"

Pip's whiskers twitched with delight. "That's the marvelous part. The Moon has no air! No wind, no rain. Every crater ever made up there is still there. The Moon is like a giant scrapbook of every bump it's ever taken over four and a half billion years."

Leo gasped. "So the crater from tonight will still be there when I'm a grown-up?"

"When you're a grown-up, when your grandchildren are grown-ups, and long after that too." Pip looked up at the Moon, silvery and quiet. "Every dot you can see up there is a story. Tonight, we're adding one more."

He handed each child their own pebble. "Now you try. Different sizes, different heights. See what your crater looks like."