Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data reveals largest newly formed moon crater in 132 years

Impact crater cools 4-mile lunar region 16 degrees at night

A scientist working with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera has identified the largest newly formed impact crater ever documented on the moon, in a finding published Wednesday that the research team characterized as a once-in-132-year event. The 728-foot-wide McGetchin crater lies on the moon’s eastern edge and was carved out between April 11 and May 22, 2024, when a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building slammed into the surface.

The discovery came during routine quality checks on Oct. 24, 2025. Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist who works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera system, scanned a wide-area moon map on his computer and noticed a large, bright spot ringed by a dark halo — the visual signature of recently disturbed ground. “I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” Wagner said. He then compared before-and-after images to confirm what he had seen.

Wagner, an Intuitive Machines employee who works with the NASA LRO science team, and several co-authors published their findings Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The crater is 728 feet across and 141 feet deep, and the researchers reported that an impact of that scale on the moon is expected only once every 132 years.

The crater was named McGetchin for Tom McGetchin, an American geologist and planetary scientist who died in 1979. It sits on the moon’s eastern edge, according to the report.

Following the crater’s discovery, a separate group of scientists using the LRO’s Diviner thermal instrument documented a striking cooling effect in a roughly 4-mile-wide zone surrounding the new feature. Nighttime surface temperatures in that area run about 16 degrees Fahrenheit lower than those of the surrounding terrain, according to a second paper published in Science Advances.

The researchers attribute the cooling to a property of the impact itself. The strike fluffs up the regolith, the loose surface rocks around the crater, making it less dense and less able to retain heat through the long lunar night. The effect extends well beyond the crater rim, demonstrating that major impacts alter the moon’s surface properties across a much wider footprint than the visible damage.

The altered ground could have practical consequences. NASA said the disrupted regolith could affect how rover wheels interact with the surface.

The McGetchin crater is the standout among the thousands of impacts catalogued by the LRO team since the spacecraft reached lunar orbit. The orbiter has been mapping the moon’s topography, surface composition, temperature and radiation environment for more than 17 years, and its team has confirmed at least 1,000 new impact craters and flagged roughly 100,000 additional surface changes from objects striking the moon. Most of those impacts, however, produced craters far smaller than the McGetchin feature.