Until recently, it was believed that the 'man in the noon' -- the craters that give the moon its human-like features -- had been created by asteroid strikes.
Now, thanks to data from NASA’s GRAIL mission, which aims to create a high-res map of the moon's gravitational field, scientists have a new theory on how the moon got its "face."
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NASA has two spacecrafts in a polar orbit around the moon, offering researchers an in-depth look at the internal and external structures of the moon -- including the craters.
“As the lunar shape varies, its gravity field changes and we’re able to observe that," explains GRAIL project scientist Michael Watkins in a NASA video.
Impact from an asteroid would have created a circular shape within the craters but researchers discovered the craters were more angular, and scientists now believe they were created by plumes of magma or lava.
Or, as MIT researchers put it, the 'man in the moon' was created by "giant tension cracks in the moon’s crust as it cooled around an upwelling plume of hot material from the deep interior.”
The discovery has been published in the journal Nature.