About 4.3 billion years ago, something really big slammed into the Moon's far side and carved out a crater 2,500 km wide, one of the largest impact structures in the solar system. The energy released was roughly equivalent to a trillion atomic bombs, and the consequences are still written into the Moon today. The collision didn't just scar the surface. It scrambled the far side's deep interior, sending heat-producing elements toward the near side. That's why the near side stayed volcanically active for billions of years longer, forming the dark flat plains visible from Earth, while the far side went geologically quiet. Water tells the same story. Deep inside the Moon, water isn't liquid, it's locked inside minerals under extreme pressure. The impact destroyed or expelled much of those water-bearing minerals on the far side. Samples returned by China's Chang'e-6 mission confirm the far side's mantle contains far less water than the near side's, a scar frozen in rock for over four billion years. Most surprisingly, the Moon's magnetic field, thought to have simply faded away. It actually rebounded around 2.8 billion years ago. Scientists believe the impact injected so much heat into the Moon's core that it temporarily restarted its internal engine one last time, before going dark for good. Credit: Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)
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