DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15755155
title: Dataset for "Open-sourcing a reconstructed catalog of new impacts on the Moon"

description: A RECONSTRUCTED CATALOG OF NEW IMPACTS ON THE MOON

Table of contents



Summary

Data description

How to reuse and cite

References

Acknowledgements


Summary

This dataset contains  85 locations of sites where meteoroids impacted the lunar surface before 2016, including:



69 craters reconstructed from Speyerer et al. 2016 

8 new craters from Oberst et al. 2012 and Robinson et al. 2015

7 impact splotches


Details of how we obtained this data can be found in Sokołowska et al. 2025, PCC (see reference below).

Data description




Filename
Description
Columns


Sokolowska_etal_2025_PCC_snapshots.pdf
This file contains thumbnails of all 69 craters that we reconstructed from Speyerer et al. (2016), as well as of 7 impact splotches. These are screenshots of the Quickmap tool (see ref).
Numbers in each row correspond to the IDs in Sokolowska_etal_2025_PCC-Craters.csv and Sokolowska_etal_2025_PCC-Splotches.csv .


Sokolowska_etal_2025_PCC-Craters-Not-Found.csv
Contains approximate locations of craters where we were not able to find new craters (see Sokolowska et al. 2025 PCC). 


Crater ID: identifier (arbitrary)

approximate latitude: latitude in degrees

approximate longitude: longitude in degrees

Comment: LROC NAC pairs we identified as locations of those craters, those are image IDs



Sokolowska_etal_2025_PCC-Craters.csv
Contains exact locations of new craters, as well as their formation times, diameters, and image IDs.


Crater ID: identifier, 1-69 reconstructed, Lit1-8 come from literature

measured diameter: crater diameter in meters

exact lat/lon: in degrees

coords from image ID: image ID in which exact lat/lon should point directly to the crater in Quickmap

Latest before ID: latest image where the crater was absent

Earliest after ID: earliest image where crater was present

formed after: date of Latest before ID image

formed before: date of Earliest after ID image

Comment: denotes images that did not come from LROC NAC



Sokolowska_etal_2025_PCC-Splotches.csv
Contains exact locations of new impact splotches, and image IDs.


Impact Splotch ID: identifier (matches _PCC_snapshots.pdf)

exact lat/lon: coordinates in degrees

before/after image ID: LROC NAC image IDs before/after formation of the splotch, not necessarily the tightest constraint





How to reuse & cite

When using this data, please cite the PCC abstract (Sokołowska et al. 2025 PCC), this dataset on Zenodo, as well as the original papers (Speyerer et al. 2016, Robinson et al. 2015, Oberst et al. 2012). If you find more new craters on the Moon, please also consider modifying our GitHub page and expanding this list for the mutual benefit of the lunar community.

Github repository: https://github.com/alexsokolowska/New_Craters_On_The_Moon

References

Sokołowska, A.,  Bernstein-Schalet, J., Khan, S., Daubar, I., Rajsic, A., Gao, T. OPEN-SOURCING A RECONSTRUCTED CATALOG OF NEW IMPACTS ON THE MOON, 16th Planetary Crater Consortium (2025) https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/crater2025/abstracts/

Speyerer, E., Povilaitis, R., Robinson, M. et al. Quantifying crater production and regolith overturn on the Moon with temporal imaging. Nature 538, 215–218 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19829

Robinson, M., Boyd, A., Denevi, B.,  Lawrence, S., McEwen, A., Moser, D., Povilaitis, R., Stelling, R., Suggs, R.,  Thompson, S., Wagner, R., New crater on the Moon and a swarm of secondaries, Icarus,Volume 252, 2015, Pages 229-235, ISSN 0019-1035, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2015.01.019.

Oberst, J., Christou, A.A., Suggs, R., Moser, D., Daubar, I.J., McEwen, A.S., Burchell, M.J., Kawamura, T., Hiesinger, H., Wünnemann, K., Wagner, R., Robinson, M.S., 2012. The present-day flux of large meteoroids on the lunar surface—A synthesis of models and observational techniques. Planetary and Space Science 74, 179–193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2012.10.005

Quickmap tool: http://quickmap.lroc.asu.edu/

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding support from NASA SSERVI LunaSCOPE and NASA grant 80NSSC20K0789. We also thank researchers on whose work we were building when compiling this dataset.