NASA discovers massive moon crater from 2024 impact, reshaping lunar science

In May 2024, something massive struck the moon. A fragment of rock from deep space hit the lunar surface with enough force to carve out a hole nearly three-quarters of a football field across and as deep as a fourteen-story building is tall. No one on Earth saw it happen. The impact went unnoticed by telescopes, by satellites, by any instrument trained on the sky. It was only months later, when NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was sorting through its accumulated images, that scientists spotted what had been left behind: a crater 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep, sitting on the moon's near side like a fresh wound.

The discovery, confirmed early this year and published this week in the journal Science Advances, represents something genuinely rare in planetary science. An impact of this magnitude—large enough to dwarf Rome's Colosseum—happens roughly once every 132 years. The researchers involved called it a "once-in-a-lifetime observation," the kind of event that comes along so infrequently that when it does, the scientific community pays close attention. The crater was eventually named after Thomas McGetchin, a former director of Houston's Lunar and Planetary Institute.

What makes this discovery particularly significant is not just its size but what it reveals about how the moon actually works. The crater is three times larger than the previous record holder, which the same orbiter had found a decade earlier. When the impact occurred, it did more than just punch a hole. The force of the collision churned the lunar surface across an area stretching more than 100 kilometers. Material was ejected outward at angles steeper than scientists had predicted, and a cold spot seven kilometers wide formed around the crater—evidence that the impact had loosened the moon's topsoil in ways that thermal imaging could detect.

Mark Robinson, the chief scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's camera system, led one of the studies published this week. His research, along with work by David Paige at UCLA, suggests that the moon's surface is far more dynamic than previously understood. The top inch of lunar soil is being completely overturned by ejected material from impacts roughly every 80,000 years—faster than earlier estimates suggested. Paige described the process in surprisingly domestic terms: impacts are essentially gardening the moon, churning sediments and bringing material from below to the surface.

This reframing has immediate practical consequences. The footprints left by Apollo astronauts, those iconic images of human bootprints in lunar dust that many assumed would persist indefinitely, will not. They will be erased within that 80,000-year window, buried under the constant churn of impact debris. More pressingly, as NASA prepares to establish a permanent base on the moon, engineers must now grapple with a new calculation: the risk posed by material ejected from future impacts. Robinson noted that the next step is to determine what danger the debris from this particular crater—and others like it—might pose to structures built on the lunar surface. That information will guide how engineers harden buildings and equipment, determining whether protective measures are merely advisable or absolutely essential.

The crater itself went undetected for more than a year. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured wide-angle images of the impact site in May 2024, shortly after the strike, but those images were not identified amid the constant stream of data flowing back to Earth. It was not until August 2025, more than a year later, that scientists working through the archive spotted the anomaly. More detailed photographs followed in the fall, and confirmation came early in 2026. The delay underscores how much information these spacecraft collect and how much human attention is required to extract meaning from it.

For NASA's lunar ambitions, the timing of this discovery is fortuitous. As the agency moves forward with plans to return humans to the moon and establish infrastructure for long-term habitation, this impact crater provides a natural experiment in what the lunar environment actually does. The data gathered by the orbiter offers insights into impact mechanics, surface composition, and the forces at work on the moon—knowledge that will inform every decision about where to build, how to build, and what protections to install. The moon, it turns out, is not the static, unchanging world it appeared to be from Earth. It is being continuously reshaped by the same cosmic violence that shaped it billions of years ago.