Make Moon Craters in 4 Steps

Materials you'll need

• Flour
• Cocoa powder
• Marbles or small glass gems in assorted sizes
• Large baking dish or bin
• Wooden spoon or spatula

 

Step-by-step tutorial

Step 1: Pour 1 cup of flour into a large baking dish. Use the back of a wooden spoon to spread it into an even layer about 2 cm deep.

Step 2: Sprinkle cocoa powder over the top of the flour until the entire surface is covered with a dark brown layer. This two-tone setup is key because the cocoa on top will show off your craters beautifully when the marble breaks through to the lighter flour underneath.

Step 3: Drop a marble straight down from just above the surface and watch a crater form.

Step 4: Now experiment! Drop the same marble from higher up to see how a faster impact makes a bigger, deeper crater. Then try marbles of different sizes to see how impactor size changes the crater shape. What patterns do you notice?

Learn more

Drop something heavy on soft ground and it leaves a dent. A space rock hitting the Moon works the same way, just at a scale that's hard to picture — an asteroid traveling faster than a bullet, slamming into the surface. The rock carries all that speed as energy, and when it hits, that energy rips out a bowl-shaped hole called a crater and flings chunks of rock in every direction. Your marble showed exactly this: dropped from higher up, it was moving faster at impact, so it dug deeper. The Moon holds onto every single one of those craters because it has no atmosphere. No wind, no rain — nothing to wear the surface down. Some craters up there are billions of years old and you can still make them out.