Final answer:
The deep holes on the Moon are known as impact craters, formed by collisions with space debris over billions of years. These craters and the resulting lunar dust characterize the Moon's surface, which consists of the old, heavily cratered highlands and the younger, smoother maria.
Step-by-step explanation:
The deep holes on the Moon are referred to as impact craters. These craters are formed by the collision of meteoroids, asteroids, or comets with the Moon's surface. Through billions of years, these impacts have occurred frequently, breaking up the rock on the lunar surface and scattering the fragments. This continuous process of crater formation by impacts is also responsible for the lunar dust that covers the surface, composed of tiny, shattered rock fragments. The appearance of the Moon's surface from Earth shows vast splotches of darker lava flows, which are contained within some of the larger craters known as lunar maria. Individual craters, thousands in number, have been named after great scientists and philosophers, such as Plato, Copernicus, Tycho, and Kepler.
The lunar highlands, which comprise most of the Moon's surface area, are noticeably more cratered than the maria. When astronauts first visited the Moon, they observed how the lunar dust clung to their equipment, highlighting the Moon's fine-grained and porous surface characteristics. While the Earth and the Moon are close in the cosmic sense, Earth's atmosphere shields us from smaller space debris, resulting in fewer visible impact craters on our planet.