NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has found a fresh crater on the Moon that measures 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep, deep enough to stack three school buses on top of one another inside it. Scientists say an impactor the size of a three- to six-story building carved the crater sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, and it now carries the official name McGetchin, after the late lunar scientist Tom McGetchin.
Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist with Intuitive Machines who works with the orbiter’s camera system, found the crater on October 24, 2025, during a routine data-quality check of a global lunar map. Two papers describing the discovery, plus a related finding about the crater’s lingering heat signature, appeared September 16, 2026, in the journal Science Advances.
Robert Wagner’s routine data check
Wagner builds global maps of the Moon using images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter‘s Wide-Angle Camera, stacking hundreds of before-and-after frames with software that renders anything unchanged in gray and anything different as a bright or dark patch. On the day he found McGetchin, an unusually large bright spot circled by a dark halo stood out immediately against the surrounding terrain, prompting him to stop his broader review and investigate that single anomaly.
The software Wagner uses generates hundreds of false alarms for every genuine crater, since it flags any shift in lighting or shadow across years of images, so he typically verifies each candidate manually by looking for a small, fuzzy halo of ejected material around a bright central point. According to NASA’s account of the discovery, McGetchin needed no such squinting; it was officially named for pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin once its size was confirmed, and Wagner has described the debris pattern as the most obvious he has seen in this kind of comparison image.
McGetchin crater’s size and the impact that carved it
Once Wagner flagged the site, scientists switched to the orbiter’s Narrow-Angle Camera, which captures roughly 3 feet per pixel compared with the Wide-Angle Camera’s football-field-sized pixels. Those sharper images, taken as the orbiter passed back over the impact site, confirmed the crater’s dimensions and revealed how far debris scattered across the surrounding terrain, details reported in the first of the two Science Advances papers.
Researchers estimate an impact this size happens on the Moon only about once a century, or less often, a rarity grounded in the orbiter’s own track record. The mission has logged at least 1,000 new craters and 100,000 additional surface changes over more than 17 years circling the Moon, and the great majority of those come from objects far smaller than the one that formed McGetchin. The smallest craters the orbiter can distinguish are about 30 feet wide, formed by rocks roughly the size of a monster-truck tire, and scientists estimate roughly 140 of those appear somewhere on the Moon each year.
No lives were at risk from the impact itself. The Moon has no atmosphere to slow or burn up incoming rock, so even a modest-sized object reaches the surface at full speed, unlike similar debris entering Earth’s atmosphere. That absence of an atmosphere is also why LRO’s long-running before-and-after comparison method works at all: nothing weathers a lunar crater’s sharp edges the way wind and rain would on Earth, so a scar from 2024 still looks freshly cut more than two years later.
Every few years the LROC team repeats this same global comparison specifically to catch craters wider than about 150 feet, since the routine narrow-angle surveys used for smaller changes would take far too long to cover the entire Moon at that resolution. McGetchin is the largest example that method has turned up since LRO began orbiting more than 17 years ago, which is part of why NASA framed its size as a once-in-a-century event rather than an unusual but unremarkable find.
Diviner’s four-mile-wide cold spot
A second team turned the orbiter’s Diviner thermal instrument toward the same coordinates after Wagner’s find and measured a 4-mile-wide zone around the crater that runs about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than the surrounding terrain, a result published in a second Science Advances paper. Scientists attribute the cooling to the way an impact fluffs up the lunar regolith, leaving it less densely packed and therefore less able to hold heat once the Sun sets.
The size of that cold halo matters beyond McGetchin itself, since it shows a single impact can measurably alter the physical properties of lunar soil for miles in every direction, well past the visible crater rim. With NASA expanding plans for sustained activity on the Moon, including future rover routes and lander sites, that kind of invisible disturbance, undetectable in ordinary photographs but easy to spot with a thermal camera, is now part of how mission planners have to read the surface.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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