New NASA research shows that our Moon constantly has to wander on its own axis due to suffering too many attacks from space.

We can see the Moon with many impact craters on its surface, the result of 4.25 billion years of history continuously receiving “bombing” from meteorites and asteroids.

According to Science Alert, NASA calculations show that even small impacts shook the initially stable position of Earth’s “unlucky” satellite, and now it has rolled 10 degrees above the Earth’s. with the original shaft, not to mention the countless rolling back and forth because of the attack.

So, each time a chunk of space rock slams into the lunar surface, it alters the lunar gravitational profile, even if just by a little bit. Cumulatively, over a very long time, this can alter the way an object moves and orients itself in space.

The empty spaces excavated by asteroid impacts causes the Moon to reorient, bringing those lower-mass holes closer to the poles. Meanwhile, higher concentrations of mass are pulled closer to the equator. Think of the way a hammer thrower spins to exert a centrifugal force on the hammer, to hurl it a greater distance.

We have, thanks to a NASA mission called Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL), an extremely detailed map of the Moon’s gravity field; so detailed that the effect of the craters can be made out. This gave planetary scientist David Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology an idea.

“If you look at the Moon with all these craters on it, you can see those in the gravity field data,” Smith explains. “I thought, ‘Why can’t I just take one of those craters and suck it out, remove the signature completely?'”

So that is what the team set out to do, looking to erase craters wider than 20 kilometers (12 miles) across. They identified nearly 5,200 craters and basins, mapping them to the gravitational data from GRAIL and then working backwards in time to erase them.

Initially, they worked manually, before handing the job to computers to virtually rewind the Moon’s history.

The effect of each individual crater was miniscule. But there were a lot of them, and with each subtraction the lunar poles crept back towards the position they were in billions of years ago. All together, the gravitational effect of all these small craters was almost equal to that of the South Pole-Aitken Basin, a colossal impact zone around 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) across, nearly a quarter of the surface of the Moon.

“People assumed that small craters are negligible,” Viswanathan says. “They’re negligible individually, but collectively they have a large effect.”

This is important: if the effect was large enough, it could have pushed the polar regions of the Moon into places where the craters are illuminated by the sunlight. If this were to occur, any frozen volatiles sheltered in the previously shadowed crater floors would sublimate, leaving less (or even no) ice as an enduring record. Since scientists want to investigate the poles to find these icy patches, this would have implications for future lunar exploration, including NASA’s upcoming crewed Artemis mission.

The team showed that the effect has not been large enough for this, which is good. But there’s more work to be done.

The final result of the analysis is fascinating, but it’s not quite the whole story. There are a lot of craters on the Moon that are outside the parameters the team included; they would have had an effect too, although perhaps a smaller one. In addition, the Moon hasn’t always been as geologically quiet as it is now. Volcanic activity could also have altered its gravitational profile over time.

However, previous work has focused only on craters larger than 200 kilometers (125 miles) across. This work, the team says, shows that every little bit does seem to count.

“There are a few things that we haven’t taken into account yet,” says planetary scientist Sander Goossens of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, “but one thing we wanted to point out is those small craters that people have been neglecting, they actually do matter, so that is the main point here.”