NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has confirmed a fresh crater 728 feet wide on the Moon’s eastern edge, one that did not exist before a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building struck sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024. Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist with Intuitive Machines who works on the orbiter’s camera data, caught the change during a routine data-quality check in October 2025. Two papers describing the crater, now officially named McGetchin, appeared in Science Advances on September 16, 2026.
The orbiter has flown for more than 17 years and has cataloged at least 1,000 new impact craters over that span, along with roughly 100,000 smaller surface changes, but McGetchin is by far the largest fresh scar the mission has confirmed. Most of the craters the mission finds each year come from debris too small to leave anything this dramatic behind.
A 728-foot scar absent from earlier maps
The crater sits on the boundary between lunar mare, the dark volcanic plains, and the brighter, older highlands, a location that gave researchers material excavated from two very different kinds of terrain to study at once. NASA’s own account of the find, describing the crater as roughly the length of two football fields, notes that the orbiter’s Wide-Angle and Narrow-Angle cameras confirmed the change by comparing images taken before and after the strike.
McGetchin measures 141 feet deep, enough to fit three school buses stacked end to end, and shows almost none of the slumping or dust accumulation that gradually softens older lunar craters. That freshness, more than the width alone, is what told researchers they were looking at something that formed within the last few years rather than centuries ago.
Narrowing the impact to a six-week window in 2024
Two peer-reviewed papers, “A new 222-m diameter lunar crater” and “New lunar crater reveals extensive distal regolith modification,” laid out the case for the crater’s age and its effects on the surrounding surface. According to EarthSky’s summary of both Science Advances papers, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s monthly monitoring schedule let researchers bracket the strike to the six weeks between April 11 and May 22, 2024, by comparing consecutive passes over the same terrain.
A thermal instrument called Diviner picked up a cold spot roughly four miles wide surrounding the crater, about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than the ground around it. The Astronomy Picture of the Day writeup explaining the anomaly attributes the cold zone to loosened, puffed-up regolith that holds heat less efficiently than compacted soil, a signature that extends far beyond the crater’s visible rim.
How Robert Wagner spotted the change
Wagner was running a standard data-quality comparison between global lunar maps, software built to flag differences rather than search for anything specific, when the McGetchin site stood out. He later said he “dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” a reaction the ScienceDaily account of the discovery frames as the moment the find went from a routine anomaly flag to an active investigation.
What made the pattern so obvious, by Wagner’s own account, was that it was unlike anything he had seen in years of reviewing similar comparison images, a debris field radiating outward in a shape distinct enough that it did not need a second look to register as new.
Nearly a year and a half separated the impact itself from its discovery, a gap that says less about how closely anyone was watching and more about how much lunar terrain the orbiter’s monthly passes have to cover. The Moon has no weather to erase a fresh scar and no plate tectonics to fold it back into the crust, so a crater like McGetchin will sit largely unchanged for the review cycles it takes analysts to work through the backlog of comparison images the mission generates every month.
The rarest class of crater on the nearest world
Julie Stopar, a senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and deputy principal investigator for the orbiter’s camera, has put the odds of a crater this size in context. Impacts of McGetchin’s magnitude happen “once every 130 years” on average, Stopar told Live Science, based on how frequently objects of that size are expected to strike the lunar surface.
Roughly 140 new craters form on the Moon each year by some estimates, but almost all of them come from projectiles too small to leave more than a pinprick. McGetchin is the exception that let researchers watch, in close to real time, what a once-in-a-century event actually does to the surface of a world with no atmosphere to soften the blow or erase the evidence afterward.
Named for Tom McGetchin, a lunar scientist from the Apollo era, the crater now serves a second purpose beyond marking a single strike: it is fresh enough, and well-enough dated, to work as a calibration point for estimating how often the Moon’s surface gets rearranged at this scale, a number planetary scientists have had to infer indirectly until an example this clean turned up in the orbiter’s own archive.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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