ИСТИНА

The characteristic diameter of the lunar crater, formed as a result of a collision of 1-km near-Earth object (NEO) with the Moon, was estimated to be about 15 km. The number of known Copernican craters with a diameter D≥15 km per unit area on the seas, according to various authors, exceeds the same number for the rest of the Moon by a factor not less than two. Our estimates do not contradict to the increase in the number of NEOs after a possible catastrophic destruction of large main belt asteroids, which could have occurred over the past 300 Myr, but they do not prove this increase. The number of Copernican craters with D≥15 km can be greater than the number of the craters presented in Mazrouei et al. (2019) . The probability of a collision with the Earth during a year of an Earthcrossing object (ECO) could be 10-8 if we consider large time intervals. For such probability, our estimates of the number of craters correspond to the model in which the number of 15-km Copernican craters per unit area for the entire surface of the Moon would be the same as for the region of the seas, if the data (Losiak et al. 2015) for D<30 km would be as complete as for D>30 km. For such a model, the rate of crater formation over the last 1.1 Gyr could be permanent.