One face always towards us. The same face always looks at us, and a day there lasts a month: two weeks of sunlight, then two weeks of night.
Across
3,470 km
Surface
37.9 million km²
A day
30 Earth days
A year
27 Earth days
From the Earth
384,000 km
Gravity
0.17 × the Earth’s
Temperature
-23 °C
Moons
0
What you’re seeing
A mosaic of photos from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has circled the Moon since 2009.
Named places
Tranquility Base: The first people to walk on another world, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, landed here on 20 July 1969. Their footprints are still there: there is no wind to blow them away.
Apollo 12: Four months after Apollo 11, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landed within walking distance of Surveyor 3, a robot lander from two years before, and brought pieces of it home.
Apollo 14: Alan Shepard, the first American in space, landed here and hit two golf balls.
Apollo 15: The first crew to drive on the Moon, in the Lunar Roving Vehicle, beside a winding valley, Hadley Rille, at the foot of mountains 4 km high.
Apollo 16: The only Apollo landing in the bright highlands, the Moon’s oldest ground.
Apollo 17: The last people on the Moon, in December 1972, in a valley on the edge of Mare Serenitatis. Nobody has been back since.
Luna 9: The first spacecraft to land softly on the Moon, from the Soviet Union, in 1966. Its photos proved the ground could hold a lander up.
Chang’e 4: The first landing on the far side, the half we never see from the Earth, in 2019. Radio cannot reach it directly, so China put a relay satellite out beyond the Moon.
Chang’e 5: In 2020 it scooped up 1.7 kg of Moon rock and flew it back to the Earth, the first samples brought home since 1976.
Chang’e 6: The first rock ever brought back from the far side, in 2024.
Chandrayaan-3: India’s lander, in 2023, the first to touch down this close to the south pole, where ice may lie in craters the sun never reaches.
Mare Imbrium: The Sea of Showers: not water but dark lava that filled a crater 1,145 km across, made by an impact 3.9 billion years ago. It is the right eye of the man in the Moon.
Mare Tranquillitatis: The Sea of Tranquility, a smooth, flat lava plain chosen for the first landing because it was safe.
Mare Serenitatis: The Sea of Serenity, a round dark plain north of Tranquility. Apollo 17 landed on its eastern shore.
Mare Crisium: The Sea of Crises, an oval of dark lava near the eastern edge of the face we see, on its own.
Oceanus Procellarum: The Ocean of Storms, the biggest dark plain on the Moon, 2,500 km across the western half of the near side.
Tycho: A young crater, about 100 million years old, whose bright rays of thrown-out rock stretch 1,500 km. You can see them from the Earth at full moon with your own eyes.
Copernicus: A crater 93 km wide with terraced walls and mountains in the middle, sometimes called the monarch of the Moon.
Clavius: One of the biggest craters on the near side, 225 km across, with a curving line of smaller craters inside it.
South Pole–Aitken basin: The biggest and oldest impact basin on the Moon, 2,500 km across and 8 km deep, on the far side. It is as wide as the Mediterranean is long.
Shackleton: A crater almost exactly on the south pole. Its floor has not seen sunlight in billions of years, which is why the next astronauts are going here: to look for ice.
Mare Orientale: A bullseye of three rings, 930 km across, right on the western edge of the face we see, so from the Earth it is seen side-on.
NASA Scientific Visualization Studio, CGI Moon Kit (LRO LROC), public domain.