NASA’s Moon orbiter finds a 728-foot crater that wasn’t there before

Robert Wagner, a scientist who works with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), was examining a large map of the Moon when something unusual stood out on his computer screen. He noticed an unusually bright patch surrounded by a dark halo, a pattern suggesting 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 and newer images of the same region, he realized the feature was a newly formed impact crater. Scientists reported on September 16 in Science Advances that it is the largest newly formed crater ever identified in the solar system.

The finding also demonstrates how useful NASA's long-running lunar observations are for tracking changes on the Moon as the agency works toward a sustained human presence and greater scientific and commercial activity there.

A Rare Impact Creates a Giant Moon Crater

The crater was 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, when an asteroid or comet roughly the size of a three- to six-story building struck the surface.

The impact carved out a crater 728 feet wide, roughly the length of two football fields. At 141 feet deep, it would be large enough to hold three yellow school buses stacked vertically.

Researchers estimate that an impact this large may occur on the Moon only about once every century, or even less frequently.

The Moon Is Constantly Being Hit

For more than 17 years, LRO has been circling the Moon while its seven instruments study the landscape, surface composition, temperature, and radiation environment.

During that time, researchers have identified at least 1,000 new impact craters. They have also recorded about 100,000 additional changes to the surface caused either by objects striking the Moon or by debris thrown outward during impacts.

Unlike Earth, the Moon has no atmosphere capable of slowing incoming space rocks or burning them up before they reach the ground. That means asteroids, meteoroids, and other objects can strike the lunar surface directly.

Most impacts are far smaller than the collision that created McGetchin. The smallest craters that scientists can reliably detect in LRO images are around 30 feet across, about the length of a three-story building lying on its side. Those craters can be produced by rocks roughly 43 inches wide, about the size of a monster-truck tire.

Scientists estimate that impacts of this size create about 140 new craters across the Moon each year. Even more impacts are caused by microscopic objects, but the holes they produce are too small to see in images taken from orbit.

A Four-Mile Cold Spot Around the Crater

LRO carries several instruments that can reveal changes not visible in camera images alone. After McGetchin was identified, scientists used the spacecraft's thermal instrument, Diviner, to examine the surrounding region.

Those observations revealed something unexpected. An area roughly 4 miles wide around the crater is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit colder at night than the nearby terrain.

In a second paper on September 16 in the same journal, researchers reported that the temperature difference appears to come from changes in the lunar regolith. The impact churned up and loosened the material around the crater, leaving it less dense and less able to hold onto heat after sunset.

The size of this "cold spot" surprised researchers because it shows that a major impact can alter the lunar surface well beyond the crater itself.

Those changes may have practical consequences for future lunar exploration. Differences in the texture and density of the regolith, for example, could influence how rover wheels move across the surface.

How NASA Found the New Crater

The LROC system photographs the Moon from an altitude of about 60 miles while LRO travels in an orbit that carries it from pole to pole.

It includes two cameras that capture detailed black-and-white images and another camera that collects moderate-resolution multispectral images. After thousands of passes over the Moon, researchers have assembled maps precise enough to identify new craters, landslides, spacecraft landers, seismic faults, and possible signs of lava tubes.

Scientists working with LROC routinely inspect close-up images taken by the Narrow-Angle Camera. These observations are usually used to search for changes smaller than 30 feet across.

Every few years, however, the team conducts a broader search for much larger features. Researchers create global maps of the Moon and compare them with earlier versions, looking for changes wider than 150 feet.

That was the task Wagner was performing on October 24, 2025, when McGetchin caught his attention.

Using images from LROC's Wide-Angle Camera, which records broad areas of the lunar surface with pixels about the size of football fields, Wagner combined hundreds of "before" and "after" images using software designed to reveal differences between them.

Features that remained unchanged appeared gray. Anything that had changed showed up as a bright or dark patch.

A Crater That Was Impossible To Miss

Although the method is effective, finding genuine new craters requires extensive manual review. Even minor changes in shadows or lighting can trigger the software, producing hundreds of false signals.

Wagner typically checks these results by searching for small, fuzzy halos around bright points only a pixel wide. Those halos can indicate sprays of regolith thrown outward by a fresh impact.

McGetchin looked nothing like the typical small feature.

The debris pattern stretched across hundreds of pixels and immediately stood out from everything around it.

"It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I've ever seen in one of these images," Wagner said.

Researchers then used LROC's Narrow-Angle Camera for a much closer look. The instrument can capture details at roughly 3 feet per pixel.

Images taken during later passes over the site allowed scientists to measure the crater's dimensions, examine its shape, and determine how the surrounding landscape had changed.

The close-up observations also helped researchers estimate the size and energy of the object that created McGetchin. More detailed results about the impact are expected to be published in a future paper.