The Moon is covered by a thick layer of loose, dusty rock fragments called lunar regolith , along with countless impact craters and dark volcanic plains called maria.

What actually covers the Moon?

  • A blanket of lunar regolith (dust, sand, pebbles, and broken rock) produced by billions of years of asteroid and meteoroid impacts.
  • Impact craters of all sizes, from tiny pits to huge basins hundreds of kilometers wide, because the Moon has almost no atmosphere to burn up incoming rocks.
  • Dark, solidified lava “seas” called maria that filled giant impact basins long ago, especially on the near side of the Moon.

What is lunar regolith like?

  • It is a charcoal-gray, powdery dust mixed with rocky debris, covering nearly the entire surface.
  • Beneath this loose layer lies fractured bedrock known as megaregolith, which is the heavily broken outer part of the crust.
  • The regolith formed as repeated impacts shattered and ground the crust over billions of years, rather than from wind or water erosion like on Earth.

What is the Moon’s surface made of?

  • The crust and regolith are rich in oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, with smaller amounts of titanium and other elements.
  • The bright highlands are mostly anorthosite (calcium- and aluminum-rich rocks), while the darker maria are iron- and titanium-rich basalt from ancient lava flows.
  • These differences are why some areas look bright and others look dark when you see the Moon from Earth.

Why doesn’t anything “hide” the Moon?

  • The Moon has an extremely thin exosphere instead of a thick atmosphere, so there are no clouds, rain, or weather to cover its surface.
  • Craters and regolith stay visible for very long periods because there is almost no wind or flowing water to erase them.
  • From Earth, what seems to “cover” part of the Moon during a lunar eclipse is Earth’s shadow, not something on the Moon itself.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.