NASA Spacecraft Spots Giant New Moon Crater

In May 2024 a fragment of an asteroid—or perhaps a comet—hurtled into the Moon’s near side and left behind a hole that would later astonish scientists. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), NASA’s workhorse orbiting the Moon since 2009, finally flagged the scar after sifting through a mountain of imagery.

The crater, now dubbed the McGetchin crater in honor of the late Thomas McGetchin of the Lunar and Planetary Institute, measures roughly 728 feet across and plunges about 141 feet deep. To put that into perspective, it’s a little larger than Rome’s ancient Colosseum, and three times bigger than the last big fresh crater the LRO spotted a decade ago.

What makes this find especially exciting is its age. Most craters we see on the Moon are billions of years old, remnants of a violent early solar system. This one, however, is a teenager—only a couple of years old—so we can watch how lunar soil, or regolith, behaves in “real time.”

Mark Robinson, the chief scientist for the LRO’s camera suite, says the ejecta—dust and rock blasted outward—shot up at a steeper angle than they’d expected. That detail, plus the discovery of a four‑mile‑wide cold spot surrounding the rim, suggests the impact churned the surface more vigorously than typical small impacts.

David Paige of UCLA likens the process to “gardening” the Moon. The impact turned over the top layer of soil, bringing deeper material to the surface and mixing everything together. This rapid turnover, Robinson notes, means the Moon’s upper inch of regolith is being refreshed roughly every 80,000 years—much faster than earlier models predicted.

One practical upshot of the research is safety planning for the upcoming Artemis outpost. By mapping how far debris can travel after an impact, engineers can design habitats that can shrug off stray rocks or, at the very least, know where to avoid the most hazardous zones.

And for the nostalgic—those who still cherish the Apollo footprints—Robinson offers a bittersweet reminder: those marks won’t survive forever. Over the next tens of thousands of years, natural micrometeorite impacts, like the one that created McGetchin, will erase them.

Two separate studies describing the crater appeared this week in Science Advances. The authors call the event “once‑in‑a‑lifetime,” estimating a similar-sized impact might only happen once every 132 years across the whole Moon. Until then, the fresh scar will keep scientists busy, watching how the Moon heals itself, and how we might safely live alongside it.