Continuously hit by 'space bombs', the Moon rolls 10 degrees

New NASA research shows that our Moon is constantly wandering on its own axis due to the constant bombardment from space.

We can see the Moon with many impact craters on its surface, the result of 4.25 billion years of continuous "bombardment" from meteorites and asteroids.

According to Science Alert, NASA calculations show that even small impacts have shaken the initially stable position of Earth's "unlucky" satellite and now, it has. rolled 10 degrees from its original axis , not to mention the countless times it has rolled back and forth due to attacks.

Earth's Moon has a rather bumpy surface, crisscrossed with impact craters - (Photo: Anh Thu).

But planetary scientist Vishnu Viswanathan from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center says there's good news: "Based on the Moon's ice-free history, the polar region wanders just enough that water near the poles has remained in shadow and had stable conditions for billions of years."

What NASA scientists are referring to is water in the form of ice that the agency and many other space agencies believe still lurks in deep impact craters on the far side of the Moon.

The moon is tidally locked to Earth, keeping one side facing us while the other remains in darkness. It is that dark side that is a promised land for space scientists, where water and other locally available materials promise to provide life and fuel to power future spacecraft and lunar bases.

That's why NASA is trying to study how asteroids hit the moon, to see if they're strong enough to cause drastic changes and dehydrate the moon. Luckily, 10 degrees isn't too much.

This map of the Moon shows the many indentations and movements of the poles. The early poles are shown in red below, while the current pole is in the center, the black stripe showing its path over the past 4.25 billion years - (Photo: NASA/MIT).

The reason the Moon wobbles, rolling off its axis even by small impacts, is because each chunk of rock changes its gravitational shape to a small or large extent . Accumulated over a long period of time, these changes are enough to lead to a change in the way the entire celestial body moves and is oriented in space.

The empty spaces gouged out by asteroids cause the Moon to rotate itself to bring low-mass holes closer to the poles.

Planetary scientist Davit Smith from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT - USA) said all the above calculations were obtained thanks to a mission called GRAIL of NASA, which helped create an extremely detailed map of the Moon's gravity field, showing the effects of each impact crater.

The study was recently published in the Planetary Science Journal.

•