NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has given scientists a wealth of new detail about the structure of the moon, which the Goddard Space Flight Center has used to compile this new animated film, showing how the moon came to look the way we know it today.

Starting about 4.5 billion years ago, you can see how the moon slowly cooled, only to be bombarded by giant asteroids and meteors over the years.

While it looks like the poor thing is getting hit several times a second, it's important to remember that this is all taking place over thousands of millions of years. The most recent major impacts created features like the Tycho Crater about 108 million years ago. So it's pretty unlikely that anything anything quite as spectacular as what we see in the video will happen in any of our lifetimes.

Goddard Space Flight Center, via Gizmodo