NASA spacecraft discovers a huge new crater on the moon
- NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team identified a newly formed 222-meter-wide lunar crater named McGetchin on the Moon's near side, which formed between April 11 and May 22, 2024.
- A comet or asteroid roughly the size of a three- to six-story building struck the lunar surface, releasing approximately 65 billion kilojoules of energy in an impact estimated to occur only once every 132 years.
- Follow-Up thermal data from the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment revealed a 4-mile-wide cold spot around the crater measuring around 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night, indicating the impact loosened surface material and reduced heat retention.
- NASA engineers are calculating the risk of ejected material striking the agency's planned moon base, using these impact measurements to design structures capable of withstanding high-velocity debris.
- The findings, published in Science Advances on Wednesday, offer a rare opportunity to study a recent, large-scale impact as NASA prepares for sustained human presence on the Moon and expanded commercial activities.
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464 Articles
Once-in-a-Century Impact: NASA Just Found a Massive New Crater on the Moon
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 [...]
NASA discovered the “once in a century” Moon crater by comparing years of lunar photographs from two different types of cameras
The space agency analyzed millions of pixels taken by an ultra-wide-angle and mega-telephoto setup over 14 years, proving that, sometimes, one rig just isn’t enough to get the job done
Scientists identified on the Moon the largest newly formed impact crater ever found in the Solar System. Named McGetchin, the structure appeared on the eastern edge of the satellite sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, but was only discovered more than a year later, during a review of images made by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) probe of Nasa. Want to live outside? See interactive guide that gathers information about 36 countries…
On October 24, 2025, Robert Wagner, a researcher at the U.S. space company Intuitive Machines, was scanning lunar maps as usual. As an image processing expert analyzing observation data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), his task for the day was to check data quality. During his work, at one place
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