Any good scientific hypothesis should be capable of generating testable predictions. There are several predictions that can be tested with the bouncing-capture hypothesis:

  1. The South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin is roughly 3.9 billion years old. The age corresponds to the beginning of the lunar cataclysm which was triggered when the Moon bounced of the Earth at that time. 
    STATUS: MORE DATA NEEDED. Lunar science considers the SPA basin to be one of the oldest on the Moon, although the age is not known with certainty because we have no rocks from this basin that can be dated. In 2018, China plans to send a lander (Chang’e 4) to the far side of the Moon. This mission may help determine the age of the SPA basin.
  2. The South Pole-Aitken basin consists of mostly crustal rock. This is because the SPA basin is an imprint of the Earth’s surface – the Earth did not penetrate deep into the Moon like a high velocity impactor would.
    STATUS: CONFIRMED BY REMOTE SENSING STUDIES. While we do not have direct rock samples from this basin yet, two remote sensing studies have determined that the SPA basin consists of less than half mantle to no mantle at all. [Pieters, et al. (1997) and Lucey et al (1998)]
  3. The Orientale basin is roughly 3.9 billion years old.
    STATUS: MORE DATA NEEDED. Lunar science currently considers the Orientale basin to be one of the younger lunar basins, perhaps 3.85 billion years old. Humans, nor robot lunar rovers, have ever been to the Orientale basin to sample it. When this is done, the age of formation of Orientale should be found to be roughly 3.9 billion years old – the same age as the SPA basin since they formed one after the other during the bounce of the Moon off Earth. 
  4. The Orientale basin is very deep – the substructure of Orientale should reach all the way to the mantle, since the Orientale pyroclasm was the mechanism that brought most of the lunar maria from the mantle to the surface.
    STATUS: MORE DATA NEEDED. Historically, Orientale has been considered to be rather shallow. At least one study published in the 21st century has described Orientale as having a deep substructure. Lunar science’s understanding of the Orientale basin and how it formed is still in its infancy, but seems to be evolving as more research is done. 
  5. The large, circular, mare-filled basins were formed at roughly the same time. This is because these basins are considered to have been formed when some of the maria from the Orientale pyroclasm fell back to the surface of the Moon. The apparent spread in dating of the rock that make up these basins is due to each basin having crossed its closer temperature at a different time.
    STATUS: MORE RESEARCH NEEDED.     Lunar science currently considers these basins to be the result of large impactors striking the surface of the Moon during the late heavy bombardment and formed over a span of hundreds of millions of years, and then later filled with maria. The bouncing-capture hypothesis considers that these basins formed at roughly the same time as there are the result of Orientale’s pyroclastic eruption falling back to the lunar surface. The apparent spread in dating may derive from the fact that these basins cooled at different rates and the maria that fills them crossed their closure temperature at different times. (A closure temperature is the temperature at which a rock is cool enough to start it’s radiometric “clock.” Above this temperature, its “clock” is continuously being reset.) A reanalysis of the crustal rock around these basins should indicate a similar age of formation of these basins. 
  6. Under some of the large, circular, mare-filled basins, there should be gaps between the deepest point of the mare fill and the mantle. Evidence of these gaps would provide strong support for a top-down emplacement of the lunar maria, and also rule out the idea of a bottom-up emplacement.
    STATUS: MORE EXPERIMENTS NEEDED. These gaps may be able to be detected through either seismic studies on the Moon or perhaps through gravitational studies like those being conducted by NASA’s GRAIL mission (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory).
  7. Evidence should exist on Earth which supports the idea that the Moon bounced off it around 3.9 Ga. One observation that may support this idea is that the oldest rocks on Earth (except for some ancient zircons) are about 3.8 billion years old. This may have been a result of the Moon stirring up the Earth’s geology and causing high levels of crustal recycling which continuously reset the ages of Earth’s rocks for 100 million years.
    STATUS: MORE RESEARCH NEEDED. The geology of Earth should be reanalyzed with this framework in mind. The 3.8 Ga upper age limit of most of the oldest rocks on Earth may find a new explanation.