The moon has many more craters than we thought, a new study finds.
More than 109,000 new craters were discovered in the low- and mid-latitude regions of the moon using artificial intelligence (AI) that was fed data collected by Chinese lunar orbiters.
The number of craters recorded on the moon’s surface is now more than a dozen times larger than it was before. The findings were published Dec. 22 in the journal Nature Communications.
“It is the largest lunar crater database with automatic extraction for the mid- and low-latitude regions of the moon,” study lead author Chen Yang, an associate professor of Earth sciences at Jilin University in China, told Live Science in an email.