Moon

NASA orbiter finds the largest new impact crater ever recorded on the moon

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has found a new crater on the moon so large that scientists call it a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, CNN reports. The steep-sided hole is about 728 feet wide and up to 141 feet deep, bigger than the Roman Colosseum, according to the Associated Press.

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A 2024 strike missed for more than a year#

The crater formed near the moon's eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, when an asteroid or comet fragment comparable to a three- to six-story building collided with the lunar surface, the Associated Press reports. The impact went undetected in real time by telescopes on Earth and in space, and LRO's wide-angle images were not flagged until August 2025, per the AP.

LRO scientist Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines, spotted a bright patch surrounded by a dark halo during a routine data check and traced it to the crater, ScienceDaily reports. "I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was," Wagner said, according to ScienceDaily.

Researchers say an impact large enough to leave a crater this size should happen only about once every 132 years on the moon, according to the study authors quoted by CNN. "This event constitutes a statistically rare, effectively once-in-a-lifetime observation," the scientists wrote, per CNN.

Named for an Apollo-era lunar scientist#

The crater was named McGetchin in honor of Thomas McGetchin, the late former director of Houston's Lunar and Planetary Institute, the AP reports. A discovery made a decade earlier by LRO held the previous record, but this formation surpasses it by a factor of three, and the moon's surface features numerous massive impact formations throughout the solar system, with one extending beyond 1,500 miles across, according to the AP.

The impact churned the lunar surface across more than 66 miles, throwing dust and rocky soil outward at a higher angle than expected, Mark Robinson, chief scientist for LRO's cameras at Intuitive Machines and lead author of one of the two studies, told the AP. The findings appeared in two studies published September 16 in the journal Science Advances, per Space.com.

A cold ring found around the new scar#

The region extending approximately 4 miles outward from the crater shows nighttime temperatures running about 16 degrees Fahrenheit below those of adjacent areas, as reported by ScienceDaily, a cooling effect that researchers attributed to the disturbed surface material. Tyler Powell, who authored one of the studies, explained to Space.com that scientists are "extremely lucky it formed during the lifetime of the LRO mission and that we are able to observe the region both before and after impact."

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