Fact #116
Geology
The high ground on the Moon is not a mountain range but the raised rim of the largest crater in the solar system, about 10.8 kilometres above the average surface.
It sits on the far side, close to the edge of the South Pole-Aitken basin, and nobody standing on it would recognise it as a summit — the slope is so gentle you would take it for a plain. Laser altimetry from orbit found it; no telescope on Earth could, because that hemisphere never turns towards us.
Source: Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, NASA LRO (opens in a new tab) · checked Sep 2026