An amazing new animation from Nasa shows how the grey, puckered rock that is our moon, was once a flaming inferno under asteroid attack.
The video shows that the moon was not always the cool, scarred rock we're used to seeing today; 4.5 billion years ago, it was a flaming hot mass of lava.
Then, 0.2 billion years later, the Aitken basin at the moon's south pole was formed by asteroid strike before the the moon came under mass assault by further asteroids between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago, forming several basins across the celestial body.
At one point the moon was engulfed in volcanic activity when liquid magma covered a large portion of the lunar surface from 3.8 billion to 1 billion years ago combined with less severe cratering. It's around this time that the Ray craters were formed.
Billions of years of assaults has given us the speckled moon - and the man therein - that we take for granted today.
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Huffington Post UK | By Melanie Hick Posted: 19/03/2012 14:08 Updated: 19/05/2012 10:12