Scientists working with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter say they have found a brand-new crater on the moon that is roughly 728 feet (222 meters) across, making it the largest freshly formed impact crater ever discovered while a spacecraft was watching. Two papers describing the find were published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
The crater, now officially named McGetchin, was punched into the lunar surface sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, near the moon’s eastern edge, according to an analysis of orbiter images. It is about 141 feet (43 meters) deep. NASA compares its width to two American football fields laid end to end and its depth to three school buses stacked on top of one another.
Based on its size, researchers estimate the object that struck the moon, likely an asteroid or a comet, was about as big as a building three to six stories tall. Impacts of this scale are rare. The Lunar and Planetary Institute, part of the Universities Space Research Association, says a crater this large is expected to form on the moon only about once every 130 years.
A bright spot that stood out
The discovery came from Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines who works with data from the orbiter’s camera system. On October 24, 2025, he was combing through wide-angle images, stacking hundreds of before-and-after frames to highlight changes in surface color, when an unusually large bright patch ringed by a dark halo caught his eye.
“I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” Wagner said. Comparing new pictures of the area with older ones confirmed that a crater had appeared where none existed before.
Wagner’s software usually flags hundreds of false alarms caused by small shifts in lighting and shadow, so he looks for fuzzy halos around bright points that suggest soil has been thrown around a fresh impact. This one was hard to miss. “It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” he said, according to NASASpaceflight.com.
The team then pointed the orbiter’s sharper Narrow-Angle Camera at the site, capturing detailed views in December 2025 that revealed the crater’s shape and a bright blanket of ejected rock and dust stretching hundreds of meters from the rim. The crater sits on the boundary between rugged, heavily cratered highlands and a broad, flat volcanic plain, or mare.
A chill around the impact site
The second paper used the orbiter’s Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment, which measures surface temperatures. Researchers found a zone about 6.5 kilometers (4 miles) wide around McGetchin that is roughly 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than its surroundings during the lunar night. Scientists think the impact loosened and “fluffed” the surrounding soil, making it less dense and quicker to shed heat. The finding could help planners understand how surface conditions may affect future robotic and crewed missions.
According to The Associated Press, as cited by the Deseret News, McGetchin is three times larger than the previous record holder for a newly formed crater, which the orbiter spotted about a decade ago.
Named for a lunar pioneer
The International Astronomical Union approved the name McGetchin in honor of Thomas McGetchin, a volcanologist and lunar scientist who became director of what is now the Lunar and Planetary Institute in 1977. A model of crater ejecta that he and colleagues published in 1973 is still widely used to interpret how debris spreads around impact sites.
The lead author of the camera study is Mark Robinson of Intuitive Machines, the orbiter camera’s principal investigator. Co-authors include Wagner and Julie Stopar of the Lunar and Planetary Institute.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launched in 2009 and is the longest-operating spacecraft ever to orbit the moon. Flying about 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) above the surface, it can detect new craters as small as about 30 feet across. Over its mission, it has cataloged at least 1,000 new impact craters and more than 100,000 other surface changes. Because the moon has almost no atmosphere, even small space rocks reach the ground instead of burning up, and scientists estimate more than 100 craters of that minimum size form every year.
