NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter helped uncover a 728-foot-wide crater that formed on the Moon in 2024 after a rare, powerful impact.
What began as a routine check of lunar mapping data quickly turned into an unexpected discovery. Robert Wagner, a scientist working with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), was examining a large map of the Moon when one feature immediately stood out: an unusually bright patch surrounded by a dark halo.
The pattern suggested that material on the lunar surface had recently been disturbed.
“I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” said Wagner, an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines who works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) system.
When Wagner compared older images with newer ones, he realized the feature had not always been there. Scientists later determined that he had found the largest newly formed crater ever identified in the solar system, according to research published September 16 in Science Advances.
The discovery demonstrates how NASA’s long-running observations of the Moon can reveal that its surface is still changing. That information is becoming increasingly important as NASA works toward a sustained human presence on the Moon alongside growing scientific and commercial activity.
A Rare Impact Leaves a Giant New Crater
The crater is officially named McGetchin in honor of pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin. It formed near the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024.
Scientists estimate that the object responsible was a comet or asteroid roughly the size of a three- to six-story building.
The collision excavated a crater 728 feet across, about the combined length of two football fields. It is also 141 feet deep, enough to hold three yellow school buses stacked vertically.
Impacts this large are exceptionally uncommon. Researchers estimate that a collision of this scale strikes the Moon only about once every century, or possibly even less often.
The Moon Is Constantly Being Bombarded
For more than 17 years, LRO has been circling the Moon while its seven instruments measure and map the lunar landscape. The spacecraft studies features including surface elevation, chemical composition, temperature, and the radiation environment.
During the mission, scientists have identified at least 1,000 newly formed impact craters. They have also recorded about 100,000 additional surface changes caused either by objects striking the Moon or by debris thrown outward during those collisions.
Unlike Earth, the Moon has no substantial atmosphere to slow incoming space rocks or cause them to burn up before reaching the ground. As a result, objects can strike the surface directly at enormous speeds.
Most are much smaller than the body that created McGetchin.
The smallest fresh craters that researchers can reliably identify in LRO images measure about 30 feet across, roughly the length of a three-story building laid on its side. These can be produced by rocks only about 43 inches wide, approximately the size of a monster-truck tire.
Researchers estimate that impacts of this size create roughly 140 detectable craters across the Moon each year. Countless smaller projectiles also strike the surface, but most leave marks too tiny to be resolved from orbit.
A Four Mile Cold Spot Around the Crater
LRO carries several instruments that can detect changes invisible in ordinary camera images. Once McGetchin had been identified, researchers used the spacecraft’s Diviner thermal instrument to examine temperatures around the impact site.
They found something striking.
A region extending about 4 miles around the crater was roughly 16 degrees Fahrenheit colder at night than the surrounding lunar terrain.
In a second paper published September 16 in the same journal, researchers concluded that the temperature difference was caused by changes to the lunar regolith.
Regolith is the loose layer of dust, broken rock, and debris covering the Moon. The impact churned and loosened this material, leaving it less densely packed. That altered surface does not hold heat as efficiently, so it cools more rapidly after sunset.
The sheer size of this “cold spot” surprised researchers because it shows that the effects of an impact can extend far beyond the crater itself.
Those changes may also have practical consequences. Looser regolith could, for example, influence how rover wheels grip and move across the lunar surface.
How NASA Found the Crater
The LROC system photographs the Moon from an altitude of about 60 miles as LRO travels around the lunar poles. It includes two cameras that collect detailed black-and-white imagery along with another camera that records broader multispectral views.
After thousands of orbital passes, scientists have assembled highly detailed maps capable of revealing far more than impact craters. LRO imagery has also been used to identify landslides, spacecraft landing sites, seismic faults, and possible signs of underground lava tubes.
Scientists working with LROC routinely inspect detailed images from the Narrow-Angle Camera, searching for small changes that are often less than 30 feet wide.
Every few years, however, the team carries out a different kind of search. Researchers construct global maps of the Moon and compare them with older maps to look for much larger changes (wider than 150 feet).
Wagner was performing one of these comparisons on Oct. 24, 2025, when McGetchin caught his attention.
Using images collected by LROC’s Wide-Angle Camera, which covers enormous areas of terrain with pixels about the size of football fields, Wagner combined hundreds of older and newer images using software designed to emphasize anything that had changed.
Areas that remained unchanged appeared gray. Differences between the two sets of observations appeared as bright or dark patches.
One Signal Stood Out Immediately
In practice, separating real surface changes from visual noise takes considerable effort. Slight differences in lighting and shadows can trigger the software, producing hundreds of false signals.
Wagner therefore checks potential detections manually. He typically searches for small fuzzy halos around bright points only a pixel wide, a pattern that can indicate regolith thrown outward by a fresh impact.
McGetchin was impossible to miss.
Instead of appearing as a tiny signal, its debris pattern stretched across hundreds of pixels.
“It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” Wagner said.
After the discovery, researchers used LROC’s Narrow-Angle Camera for a much closer look. Its images can resolve details at roughly 3 feet per pixel.
As LRO passed over the site again, these sharper observations revealed McGetchin’s dimensions, shape, and the extent of disruption in the surrounding landscape.
The images also gave scientists information they could use to estimate the size of the incoming object and the force of the collision. Those calculations are expected to be presented in a future paper.
References:
“A new 222-m diameter lunar crater” by Mark S. Robinson, Aaron K. Boyd, Prasun Mahanti, Madeleine R. Manheim, Emerson J. Speyerer, Julie D. Stopar and Robert V. Wagner, 16 September 2026, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeh7812
“New lunar crater reveals extensive distal regolith modification” by Tyler M. Powell, Benjamin T. Greenhagen, Tyler Horvath, Jean-Pierre Williams, Elisha Jhoti, Emerson J. Speyerer, Catherine M. Elder and David A. Paige, 16 September 2026, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeh9568
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