Until now. “Stuart’s remarkable photograph of the collision gave us an excellent starting point in our search,” said Dr. Bonnie J. Buratti of NASA JPL. She and Lane Johnson of Pomona College teamed to do a Mulder and Scully. “We were able to estimate the energy produced by the collision [about 0.5 megatons or 35 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb]. Using Stuart’s photograph of the lunar flash, we estimated the object that hit the moon was approximately 20 meters (65.6 feet) across, and the resulting crater would be in the range of one to two kilometers (.62 to 1.24 miles) across. We were looking for fresh craters with a non-eroded appearance,” Buratti said. “But we calculated that any crater resulting from the collision would have been too small to be seen by even the best Earth-based telescopes, so we looked elsewhere for proof.”
They started with 1960s Lunar Orbiter photos and found nothing. Then it was on to records from the 1994 Clementine mission. Voila. Buratti and Lane’s search of images from Clementine uncovered a remarkable find: a very special 1.5-kilometer (0.93 mile) wide crater. It had a bright blue, fresh-appearing layer of material surrounding the impact site, and it was located in the middle of Stuart’s photograph of the 1953 flash. The crater’s size is consistent with the energy produced by the observed flash; it has the right color and reflectance, and it is the right shape. A report of their research appears in the latest issue of the space journal Icarus.
Dr. Stuart died in 1968. His son Jerry Stuart offered some thoughts about Buratti and Lane’s findings. “Astronomy is all about investigation and discovery. It was my father’s passion, and I know he would be quite pleased,” he said.