McGetchin crater is 728 feet wide, about the length of two football fields, and it is the largest newly formed impact crater ever identified anywhere in the solar system. Its formation date is bracketed to a window of six weeks: after 11 April 2024 and before 22 May 2024. A space rock estimated at three to six stories tall made it, and scientists put the odds of an impact that large at roughly once a century or rarer.
The crater sits near the Moon’s eastern edge and is 141 feet deep, according to NASA. Two papers describing it appeared in Science Advances on 16 September 2026, more than two years after the impact. The event dates to 2024; the formal analysis reached print in September 2026, and the discovery itself was made in October 2025.
A map-differencing search in LROC imagery
The discovery came from a routine comparison of global lunar maps, not from anyone watching the Moon at the moment of impact. Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines who works with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team, ran software that subtracts “before” mosaics from “after” mosaics built from the orbiter’s Wide-Angle Camera. On 24 October 2025 the difference image showed an unusually large bright spot ringed by a dark halo.
NASA’s account of the find quotes Wagner calling it “by far the most obvious impact debris pattern” he had seen in images of this kind. Sci.News reports that he dropped everything else on his desk to work out what the spot was.
The wide-angle pixels are about the size of a football field, so that camera could flag the splash of ejecta across hundreds of pixels but could not resolve the pit. Follow-up pictures from the Narrow-Angle Camera, at roughly three feet per pixel, did that work and gave the width and depth figures, while Diviner supplied the thermal picture.
The six-week window from 11 April to 22 May 2024
No instrument recorded the moment the crater formed. The April-to-May bracket comes from before-and-after imaging of the site, a comparison that, as ScienceDaily’s summary of the two papers puts it, pins the impact to “sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024.” A narrower date would need another image taken inside that gap, and none has been reported.
Orbiter imaging has done this kind of bracketing before. The LROC team used a similar divide-one-image-by-another method to find the small crater left when NASA’s LADEE probe was deliberately crashed in April 2014, a crater under 10 feet across that sat within 968 feet of the predicted spot. In 2023 the camera team located the roughly 10-meter hole made by Russia’s Luna 25 crash within days. McGetchin is a far larger and unplanned member of the same catalog.
Ejecta, a cold spot and what the two papers measured
The two Science Advances papers split the job. Mark Robinson and colleagues, in “A new 222-m diameter lunar crater,” describe the pit itself; the 222 meters is the same figure as 728 feet. A second paper led by Tyler Powell, titled “New lunar crater reveals extensive distal regolith modification,” follows what the blast did to ground far from the rim, where thrown regolith altered the surface well outside the crater’s own bowl. Between them the papers treat the event as both a cratering-mechanics case and a surface-change survey.
The orbiter’s Diviner thermal instrument found a cold spot about 4 miles (6 kilometers) wide around the crater. At night it ran roughly 16 degrees Fahrenheit, about 9 degrees Celsius, cooler than the surrounding terrain, a sign that excavated, fluffy material was still radiating heat differently from older soil. Sci.News reports that surface changes extend across more than 1,000 crater radii, far beyond what the visible ejecta blanket would suggest.
The crater carries the name of Tom McGetchin, a pioneering lunar scientist, and the 16 September date matters for attribution: the size, depth and impact-window figures here come from NASA’s description and the published papers, not from any newer measurement.
The superlative and the century-scale odds
NASA’s page calls McGetchin the largest newly formed crater found in the solar system. The ScienceDaily write-up carries the same superlative and does not name the previous record holder, so the margin over earlier fresh craters on the Moon or Mars is not given in the coverage read for this article.
The rate is the figure with the most bearing on future landers and crews, because NASA frames the find as relevant to human missions and commercial activity on the surface. An event expected about once a century or less often is rare enough that the 2024 impact is likely to remain the benchmark for a long while. The two Science Advances papers fix its size at 728 feet, its window at 11 April to 22 May 2024, and its footprint as a cold spot about 4 miles wide.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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