McGetchin crater has emerged as the moon’s largest recently formed impact site, a rare event documented in detail by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The feature, created in 2024, spans about 728 feet across and 141 feet deep, according to two studies published September 16 in Science Advances.
Researchers say fresh lunar craters help reveal the moon’s makeup and evolution, and the findings can guide future human and robotic activity at the surface.
The discovery came in October 2025, when Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines, noticed a striking bright spot encircled by a darker halo in imagery from the orbiter’s camera system. That pattern signaled a major surface disturbance.
“It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” Wagner said in a statement.
By comparing images taken before and after, the team determined the impact occurred on the moon’s eastern limb between April 11 and May 22, 2024. The diameter slightly exceeds the length of two football fields, and the depth could fit three school buses stacked end to end.
Wagner and colleagues estimate that an asteroid or comet roughly the height of a three- to six-story building struck the surface. They calculate events of this scale occur about once every 132 years.
Tyler Powell, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and co-author of the companion study, said a crater of this size is expected only once per century, adding that the timing allowed before-and-after observations during the ongoing LRO mission.
The new feature was named McGetchin crater, honoring lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, who died in 1979.
McGetchin crater shows widespread thermal and surface effects
Launched in 2009, the LRO has mapped lunar topography, composition, temperature and radiation for nearly two decades. After Wagner’s initial identification of McGetchin crater, follow-up measurements with the orbiter’s Diviner thermal instrument revealed a roughly four-mile-wide zone around the impact that runs about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than surrounding terrain at night. Researchers attribute the “cold spot” to regolith that was lofted and fluffed by the blast, lowering its density and heat retention.
The team also found that ejecta disturbed the surface more than 75 miles from the crater, underscoring how far impact effects can extend. Those findings have implications for the safety and design of future operations, vehicles and infrastructure on the moon.
Powell said understanding surface properties is vital when planning to send rovers, astronauts and construction equipment. Observing the birth and evolution of a large, fresh crater provides a unique opportunity to assess those conditions remotely.
As NASA advances plans for a sustained human presence on the moon, scientists are working to assess the risk that impact debris could pose to future bases, said Mark Robinson, a co-author on the imaging study and a member of the LRO camera team at Intuitive Machines.
Collisions are central to how planets form and change, offering insight into dynamics, subsurface composition and internal structure, planetary scientists note. Unlike Earth, the moon lacks an atmosphere to slow and burn up most incoming objects, leaving it fully exposed to bombardment. While the surface is heavily cratered, most features are ancient and weathered, and brand-new craters are usually too small to analyze in detail from orbit.
That rarity makes the 2024 formation of McGetchin crater, the studies conclude, a statistically uncommon and effectively once-in-a-lifetime observation.
Quick fact: A separate recent impact
On August 5, the moon gained another new scar when a stray SpaceX rocket component struck the surface, a separate event from the natural impact that formed McGetchin crater. A much older collision is at the heart of the mysterious 5,000-year-old necklace of 42 teeth uncovered in Poland.
SpaceX developed the Falcon and Starship launch systems that periodically send hardware toward the moon and beyond.