Impact Flashes of Meteoroids on the Moon

This chapter focuses on the phenomenon of meteoroid impacts on the Moon and the analysis of the impact flashes produced by these events. The chapter includes a description of the observational technique employed to detect these flashes, and the most relevant results obtained so far by different researchers working in this field are reviewed. The luminous efficiency for meteoroids impacting the Moon is analysed. This parameter is the fraction of the kinetic energy of the meteoroid that is converted into light during the impact, and its value is not yet known with enough accuracy. The problem of the association of these impact flashes with meteoroid streams or the sporadic background is also addressed, describing how the probability of association with a stream may be quantified.