NASA explains the truth behind the man on the moon

IT MIGHT be a folk tale to some, but scientists at NASA have revealed how the man on the moon got his rugged good looks - and it all started with one hell of a collision.

NASA scientists have uncovered how the man on the moon got his rugged good looks.

IT MIGHT be a folk tale to some, but scientists at NASA have revealed how the man on the moon got his rugged good looks.

According to European lore, it all began when a couple were punished for working Christmas Eve and given the option of either freezing on the moon or burning on the sun.

The woman chose the sun and the man - you guessed it - the moon.

But thanks to NASA's latest and greatest technology, researchers have uncovered a slightly more believable reason; that its large holes were created by an asteroid that collided with the moon almost four billion years ago, when it was still in its infancy.

News_Image_File: The twin GRAIL spacecraft mapped the moon's gravity field, as depicted in this artist's rendering. Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech

"We know the dark splotches are large, lava-filled, impact basins that were created by asteroid impacts about four billion years ago," said Maria Zuber, GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) principal investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

The scientists made the discovery after launching a pair of probes, GRAIL A and GRAIL B, that orbited the moon and measured its internal structure in "unprecedented detail" from September 2011 until December 2012.

They were eventually renamed Ebb and Flow. How appropriate.

News_Image_File: Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first men to land on the moon, plant the U.S. flag on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. Picture: AP Photo/NASA

The moon formed approximately four-and-a-half billion years ago when an object the size of a planet orbited Earth's atmosphere and ploughed into it, creating the two separate entities we know now.

The moon is approximately one-quarter the size of Earth and is slowly drifting from our planet; 1.4 metres since Neil Armstrong made a giant leap for mankind.

The gap grows by one-and-a-half inches per year.

News_Rich_Media: R.E.M. Man On the Moon

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