Scientists Found a Huge New Crater on the Moon. Here's What It Means

NASA announced on September 16, 2026, that its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had located the largest newly formed impact crater ever discovered in the solar system.^[1] The crater has been named McGetchin, after the lunar scientist Tom McGetchin.^[1]

What was found

According to NASA, the crater is 728 feet (about 222 meters) wide and 141 feet deep, and lies on the Moon's eastern edge.^[1] It was excavated by a comet or asteroid estimated to be three to six stories tall, striking sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024.^[1] The crater was identified on October 24, 2025, by Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist on the LRO team.^[1]

The spacecraft behind the discovery

LRO launched on June 18, 2009, and maps the lunar surface, measures its temperature and composition, and identifies safe landing sites.^[2] NASA describes it as the longest-lived lunar orbiting mission ever.^[2]

How a new crater is recognized

NASA gives the impact date as a window of just over a month, April 11 to May 22, 2024, while the discovery came more than a year later, on October 24, 2025.^[1]

Why it matters

NASA notes that an impact of this magnitude happens on the Moon about once in a century, or even less often.^[1] The Moon has no atmosphere to slow or burn up incoming objects, so even small bodies reach the surface at full speed.^[1] Without liquid water or wind to erase them, evidence of the solar system's impact history is preserved on the Moon for billions of years.^[3]

The impact also altered its surroundings. NASA reports a roughly four-mile-wide "cold spot" around the crater, which at night is about 16°F cooler than the neighboring terrain.^[1]

What this does not mean

The finding is not evidence that impacts are becoming more frequent. It is notable because of the crater's size, and because its age is known to within weeks.

This article relies on NASA's announcement as its primary source. Details such as dates and dimensions are as published by NASA; other outlets may report them differently.

The LROC team's own write-up gives the crater's diameter as 222 meters and its depth as 43 meters, with wall slopes averaging 24 degrees and a rim standing about 8 meters above the pre-existing surface. It places the impact between April and May 2024 and says the feature was first identified in a Wide Angle Camera temporal ratio comparing images taken months apart.^[4] The same page reports surface disturbances detected more than 100 kilometers away and notes that impact-crater formation models predict a crater of this size forming about once every 132 years on the Moon.^[4] The detailed analysis is published in Science Advances.^[4]