The 50,000-year-old crater that prepared NASA for the moon

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

**Tyler Johnson** (0:22)
Full astronaut gear doing the same thing that we're doing, and on a little bit rougher of a trail.

**Chris Bentley** (0:28)
Before NASA sent Apollo astronaut to the moon, they trained at the bottom of a 50,000 year old crater in Northern Arizona. Now for the first time ever, you can visit Meteor Crater as well.
It's Friday, July 24th, and this is Here & Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. Today on the show, we're taking a road trip. We'll visit the famous Detroit Industry murals painted by Diego Rivera almost a century ago to reflect on how they still inspire awe today.

**Benjamin Colman** (1:10)
This was intended to provoke a strong response, and it did, and I am thankful every time I walk through this courtyard that the museum chose to stand behind the artist project and vision, and did not succumb to those calls to destroy the artwork.

**Chris Bentley** (1:27)
Also, if you're gonna take a road trip, you're gonna need some audiobooks. We've got some recommendations coming up in about 15 minutes.
But first, Peter O'Dowd takes us on a journey through the depths of time and into the mystery of space, all without leaving Northern Arizona. Here's Peter.

**Peter O'Dowd** (1:49)
Ages ago, before humans lived in North America, a space rock pierced the atmosphere and screamed in a blaze of light toward the surface of the earth. Oh, the catastrophe it must have been when the meteor hit the ground near modern-day Winslow, Arizona. The hole it left behind was a mile wide, and 50,000 years later, I walked right into it.

**Tyler Johnson** (2:13)
We believe there was a 150-foot diameter meteorite that came in at about 26,000 miles per hour.

**Peter O'Dowd** (2:22)
That's big and fast.

**Tyler Johnson** (2:23)
Yes, huge, massive and very fast.

**Peter O'Dowd** (2:26)
Tyler Johnson is my guide into one of the best preserved impact craters on the planet. For years, visitors have wanted access to the bottom, and now, for the first time ever, it's open to the public. So one morning in June, three tourists and I headed down a narrow trail one step at a time.

**Tyler Johnson** (2:44)
So this is the start of the trail. From here, it is going to be like we're off-roading. So just be very careful of your step and we'll have a good time.

**Peter O'Dowd** (2:52)
This part of Northern Arizona is windswept and mostly barren. But 50,000 years ago, it looked very different. Mammoths and giant ground sloths roamed the Juniper Pinyon forest.
The trail is steep, loose rocks slip underfoot. Decades ago, NASA astronauts traveled this same path. They came here during the Apollo mission to prepare for their trip to the moon.

**Tyler Johnson** (3:19)
And that's what they did in the 60s and 70s, full astronaut gear doing the same thing that we're doing and on a little bit rougher of a trail.

**Peter O'Dowd** (3:27)
Further down the trail, we go past a tangle of old pipes that once carried water to miners on the crater floor. I noticed that fellow hiker Gina Stoll is taking her time. How's it going for you?

**Tyler Johnson** (3:39)
It's going fine.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:40)
It's good. I'll be a lot better on the way up.

**Peter O'Dowd** (3:43)
What's your impression so far?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:45)
It's quite magnificent, really. What about you?

**SPEAKER_6** (3:48)
Oh, I think it's pretty unique.

**Peter O'Dowd** (3:50)
Yeah, yeah. In the distance, something catches our eye. It's the tail of an old airplane. In the 1960s, a Cessna lost power over the crater and crashed.

**Tyler Johnson** (4:00)
We're getting there, getting close.

**Peter O'Dowd** (4:02)
The 30-minute hike, 570 feet down, passes through planetary history in the blink of an eye. At the bottom, the crater walls embrace you. The only view of the sky is straight up. It's hot. It's time to rest. Johnson sits in a sliver of shade, and I ask more questions about this special place. Well, let's start with the rock that made this big hole in the ground. What do we know about it?

**Tyler Johnson** (4:28)
So what we know or what we believe we know, I should say, it is primarily made up of metals. So 92% iron, 7% nickel, 0.5% cobalt, making it incredibly heavy. So incredibly fast and incredibly massive.

**Peter O'Dowd** (4:44)
Can you even imagine how big the explosion would have been?

**Tyler Johnson** (4:48)
It would cause shock all the way up to 100 miles away. And so the explosion was incredible. It was like an atomic or a nuclear bomb.