• Why are there craters on the moon? Some scientists believe that they are from comets and asteroids, but they are wrong. In the year 666 Mt. Olympus erupted. The amount of debris and ash was too much for the Earth to hold. It had nowhere to go. Despina, the goddess of gravity, had an idea. She thought that if she was able to collect all of the remains, she could squeeze it into a ball and leave it out in space. With help from Aeolus, the god of wind, Despina collected everything that wasn’t supposed to be on Earth and brought it into space. There she and Aeolus compacted all of it into a big ball. They left it, hoping that it would just float away, and came back down to Earth.
    Every night after Apollo had gone away in the west, Despina would see the ball of debris and ash (now known as the moon) and wonder if she had completely thought her plan through. Was it really going to drift away into the unknown? For days she watched in fascination as it came up every night after Apollo left, and went away as he arrived the next day.
    One day, however, she noticed that something was wrong; the ball looked somehow different. She decided to go and check it out. It took her about only two minutes to fly up to the moon and see what was wrong. Her perfectly smooth spherical ball had a few tiny dents and cracks in it. Furious that her creation was destroyed, Despina put a curse on the moon- now every time somebody looks at her hideous masterpiece, it will get a little more dented.
    Once the first new moon occurred, Despina noticed that the moon was really bright, and that all of the craters were completely exposed and visible. Aeolus, along with every other god, soon observed what Despina saw. Hermes saw the destruction and alerted Zeus, who was confused. He thought that Despina would have been very upset, but instead, she was nowhere to be found. Despina had snuck away and found a cave where she could be alone. She cried herself to sleep knowing that once Zeus found out about her curse, he would punish her severely because gods and goddesses weren’t allowed to curse anything without reason.
    In the morning she awoke to the sound of a loud noise, like the sound of a tornado. Startled, she jumped up and got in a fight stance. When she saw who was standing before her, she relaxed a little. Aeolus had come to warn her that Zeus had found out about what she did and put a reward up for her capture. Gods and goddesses all over had joined in the search to find her. Despina didn’t know what to do, so she left Earth and flew to the moon. She was flying at such a high speed that when she got close to it she couldn’t slow down and crashed, forming the largest crater on the moon. It is called the South Pole-Aitken. It is told that Despina never survived that crash, but she did. She lives inside as its one and only resident. Despina’s curse was never stopped, so every time someone looks at the moon, another crater appears.