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hubie writes:

Researchers used thousands of images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and found at least 222 new impact craters. In earlier work, scientists took LRO imagery and compared them to old Apollo photos and found new craters. For this work, they identified over 14,000 LRO images that were taken under similar lighting conditions but at different times, and by comparing these images they found hundreds of new craters spread randomly across the surface.

There are more fresh craters measuring at least 10 metres across than standard cratering calculations would suggest. This could mean that some young lunar surfaces may be even younger than thought, says Daubar. She calls the work "a significant advance in the field of crater chronology", noting that it can even be used to compare cratering rates on the Moon and Mars.

From the paper's Editor's Summary:

Emerson Speyerer and co-authors use 14,092 temporal ('before and after') image pairs obtained by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to quantify the contemporary crater-production rate on the Moon. They identify broad reflectance zones associated with the new craters that they interpret as evidence of a surface-bound jetting process, and estimate that this secondary cratering process is churning the top of the regolith much faster than previously thought.

Original Submission