NASA used this town to train Moon astronauts: The German town built inside a meteor crater filled with diamonds
Nordlingen is no ordinary German town. With its red roofs, church towers, and ring of ancient walls, it wears its medieval charm beautifully. But beneath the picturesque streets and historic spires lies a story shaped by a meteor, a giant crater, and the wreckage of deep space. Hidden beneath its historic charm is evidence of a catastrophic cosmic event. The entire town sits inside the Nordlinger Ries, a massive meteor crater formed around 15 million years ago when an asteroid crashed into Earth. The impact created rocks filled with microscopic diamonds that were later used to build much of the town itself. Millions of years later, NASA recognised the site’s unusual geology and brought Apollo-era astronauts there to study terrain similar to the Moon’s surface. The diamond-filled meteor crater that built the German town of Nordlingen Scientists estimate the asteroid responsible for the Ries crater was roughly 1 to 1.5 km wide. Travelling at enormous speed, it struck southern Germany wit..
