This is the largest impact crater in the Solar System and is located on our own natural satellite.

This is the largest impact crater in the Solar System and is located on our own natural satellite.

The Aitken basin is a gigantic impact scar in the lower southern hemisphere of the far side of the Moon, and is the largest crater in the Solar System (that we know of).

The basin is about 2,500 kilometers in diameter and, at a depth of 13 kilometers, it is also the deepest impact crater .

Geological accidents

Despite the fact that this gigantic crater has existed for about 3.9 billion years, we were not aware of its existence until 1959, when the Soviet space probe Luna 3 took the first photographs of the far side of the Moon .

s View of Aitken from Apollo 17 taken at 121 km altitude

The crater was named in memory of Robert Grant Aitken , an American astronomer who specialized in binary star systems.

The Moon has only been stepped on by 12 people, and the last man to step on this satellite was Gene Cernan , Apollo 17 commander, on December 14, 1972.

The largest impact crater on Earth is the Vredefort crater near Johannesburg in South Africa, with a diameter of 300 kilometers.

z Oblique view, also from Apollo 17

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