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While reading the recent story about the Chinese lunar rover examining a boulder at close range, I thought of an interesting question. How much would lunar boulders move over billions of years and what would be pushing them around? It seems like an appropriate model would be a very warped billiard table covered in a layer of thick sand with the boulders more or less loose on the top. The sand corresponds to lunar regolith which is a thick layer of meteorite-caused dust that covers the entire moon.

Slight vibrations shouldn't move them much because they would be nestled in that regolith. But enough occurrences of large forces say from nearby earthquakes or asteroid impacts could move them a great distance over those long periods , I guess it depends on whether the regolith rapidly absorbs the energy of the boulder or not.

It seems like a random walk computer model that one could run with modest resources once one can characterize how the forces would act on these boulders.

Distribution of boulders and boulder tracks might well inform us of how common and how big such disruptive forces are as well as the locations of any repetitive forces (say from a fault zone).

While I don't think it's likely, even the heat/freeze cycle of lunar day/night might move these things around.

So what do you think?