Asteroid passes just 8,700miles from Earth

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

My question is, what happens if something of that size hits the moon? No atmosphere to burn it up, much smaller mass to have to absorb the impact... though I guess the gigantic craters prove that it's not going to knock the thing off course or anything.

There is an eleventh-century or so record of three monks sighting a substantial meteoroidal impact on the Moon. They had no idea this was what they were seeing but they described a fountain of sparks shooting from the Moon's southern limb, and the appearance of the limb splitting, becoming forked.

And there's a very fresh-looking crater just about there, too, big enough that the fireworks would have been naked-eye visible. They think that might be the one. A bit of asking around on an astronomy board like Bad Astronomy/BAUD might yield some idea of the meteoroid's size.