McGetchin Is the Largest New Crater Ever Recorded

The newly found McGetchin crater on the Moon, 222 metres wide, is the largest fresh impact crater ever recorded in the solar system, scientists say.

A comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-storey building slammed into the Moon's eastern edge sometime between 11 April and 22 May 2024, and nobody noticed at the time. The impact left a crater named McGetchin measuring 222 metres (728 feet) wide — just over two football fields — and 43 metres (141 feet) deep. According to CNN, the study authors named the feature in honour of Dr. Thomas McGetchin, the late Apollo-era lunar scientist who advanced the understanding of impact cratering. Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines working with Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera data, spotted it on 24 October 2025 while scanning stacked before-and-after LRO images, telling CNN he "just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was."

Two studies published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances report that McGetchin is the largest newly formed crater ever found in the solar system since humans began monitoring such features. "Crater production models indicate that an impact of this magnitude is expected to occur only once every 132 years on the Moon," the authors wrote, calling it "a statistically rare, effectively once-in-a-lifetime observation." Before this discovery, the largest contemporary impact crater found on the Moon was an estimated 230 feet (70 metres) in diameter — meaning McGetchin more than triples the previous record holder. BBC Sky at Night Magazine reports impacts of this scale occur on the Moon only about once every century, underscoring how lucky the timing was.

Wagner described it to CNN as "by far the most obvious impact debris pattern" he had ever seen in such images — an enormous bright spot surrounded by a dark halo. Confirmation came from sharp close-ups by the orbiter's Narrow-Angle Camera, including a December 2025 close-up and an angled March 3 view showing the crater's depth. A separate team analysing data from LRO's Diviner thermal instrument found a cold area spanning about 6.4 kilometres (four miles) surrounding the crater, registering 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night. Lead author Tyler Powell, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, told CNN the disturbances create "a fluffier layer that is less able to retain heat throughout the night," showing impacts modify the surface far beyond the crater itself.

The Moon has no protective atmosphere, so it endures constant bombardment that Earth's thick atmosphere largely absorbs — roughly 140 new craters appear on the Moon each year, per CNN. Tracking impact rates matters because NASA is working toward returning humans to the lunar surface in 2028 and eventually building a base there. As CNN notes, understanding the rate and magnitude of lunar impacts could be critical for planning a moon base and other infrastructure under the Artemis program. University of Arizona professor Jeff Andrews-Hanna, who was not involved in either study, told CNN the object may have been close in size to the Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russia in 2013, reminding us of the importance of cataloguing near-Earth asteroids.

The discovery is a tribute to the endurance of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched in 2009 and has spent more than 17 years circling the Moon from roughly 50-97 kilometres above its surface. According to CNN, LRO data has enabled scientists to track at least 1,000 new impact craters and 100,000 other surface changes, including landslides and crashed landers. Study coauthor Mark Robinson, principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, told CNN he is "surprised almost every day" by the latest lunar images even after 17 years of operation.