Meteorites pummel the Moon far more than expected
nature.com
nature.com
That said, it does mean you should keep watch for incoming impacts. Even a couple of kilograms of Chondrite coming in at 27,000 miles an hour is going to leave a mark on your fancy moon base. Subterranean safe rooms and auto sealing atmosphere preservation doors are going to be required equipment.
simple space/Moon version of anti ballistic missile defense system like Patriot/Aegis/S-400 should take care of it. Especially if armed with small nuclear warhead, there are still a lot of them lying around without any use.
Compare the far side [1] to the near side [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_side_of_the_Moon#/media/Fi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_side_of_the_Moon#/media/F...
Of course, any moon base would probably be on the near side anyways to communicate with earth.
[1] https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-two-faces-of-the-m...
As seen from the moon the Earth is only 2 degrees across - that leaves the other 178 degrees wide open for hits.
I doubt it makes much difference to the hit rate - and certainly not "dramatically reduce".
Averaged over the entire sky it's a null effect.
> Meteorites can churn up the lunar surface in several ways. Along with the fresh craters, Speyerer's team found more than 47,000 ‘splotches’, formed when material gets kicked up by the main impact and rains down — sometimes tens of kilometres away.
> And that means a bigger risk for any future lunar habitats, says Stephanie Werner, a planetary geologist at the University of Oslo. The chances of a lunar base being nailed by a direct meteorite hit are relatively small, but the splattered material could pose a hazard.
It's unclear from the article whether they are saying that they observed 222 impact craters, or calculated that there were 222 impact craters across the moons surface.
222 impact craters across the entire moon over 7 years, is an insignificant number.
> Speyerer’s team used a computer program to automatically analyse 14,092 of these paired images, looking for changes between the two. The 222 newfound craters are distributed randomly across the lunar surface, and range between 2 and 43 metres in diameter.
"Calculating" - you don't actually see all of the craters, but you can infer, based on various new deposits/splotches of ejecta, that in the time reviewed, that approximately 222 new craters were created on the surface of the moon.
The difference between the two, is that in the case of seeing 222 craters, it leaves open the possibly that many others, particularly on the "Dark Side" also occurred. In the case of calculating, it may be the case that they are suggesting that a total of 222 major craters were created during that window of time.
It is very significant if you built the ablative meteorite shielding for your spacecraft assuming there would be 1/3rd less meteorites. It would be surprising to me if this error did not affect the entire distribution of interplanetary meteorites.