We may think we know the face of the moon, but its mottled complexion still holds a few surprises.

Recently, a team of scientists found a new, 200-kilometer wide crater on the lunar nearside – a large pockmark that remained anonymous for billions of years.

To be fair, it’s mostly buried beneath material kicked out by an even bigger impact, said Rohan Sood, a graduate student at Purdue University who presented the observations March 16 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

“You’re probably the first person to discover a new, nearside crater in the last century or two,” Purdue’s Jay Melosh told Sood afterward.

View Images Gravity data revealed the presence of a mostly buried, large lunar crater. (Courtesy of Rohan Sood)

twin GRAIL spacecraft

“Gravity is just more truthful, in a way,” says Loic Chappaz, another Purdue graduate student on the team.

When the team took a close look at the GRAIL gravity data, it spotted the signature of a large, buried crater. It wasn’t what they were expecting to find — “we were looking for buried, empty lava tubes,” Sood says – and the team realized they could use GRAIL data to search for hidden structures.

After verifying the crater’s presence, the team named it after Amelia Earhart, who was on faculty at Purdue before piloting a Purdue airplane on her last, fateful journey.

Earhart crater is located just north of Mare Serenitatis, a dark lunar basin that’s easily visible with the unaided eye. The crater, however, is not. When a massive impact formed the Serenitatis basin roughly 3.9 billion years ago, it kicked up enough material to mostly erase the slightly older Earhart crater.

“It threw out broken, melted rock and flooded the surface, several kilometers deep, and in the process removed the direct evidence of this older crater,” Melosh says.