On the moon‘s extreme western rim, straddling the border with the lunar far side, a landmark nearly 600 miles wide almost completely escapes Earth’s view.
A colossal asteroid-like invader once ripped through the lunar crust, flinging out rings of mountains and scooping out a giant bowl, later flooded and backfilled with dark lava. The bullseye still stands today, scars memorializing that long-ago catastrophe.
From space orbiter cameras, Mare Orientale, which means “Eastern Sea” in Latin, reads clearly as a fossil of violence, geometry, and time. But despite the lunar feature’s vastness, its location has forced it to remain one of humanity’s white whales.
“Orientale has never been seen by human eyes,” said Reid Wiseman, commander of NASA‘s Artemis II.
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