NASA discovers massive moon crater from rare impact event

Two years ago, something massive struck the moon. A fragment of asteroid or comet, somewhere between three and six stories tall, slammed into the lunar surface with enough force to carve out a hole nearly three-quarters of a mile wide. No one on Earth saw it happen. The impact went undetected in real time, invisible to telescopes and spacecraft watching from orbit. It wasn't until August 2025—more than a year after the strike—that scientists sorting through mountains of imagery from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter finally spotted what had been there all along: a crater 728 feet across and 141 feet deep, roughly the size of two football fields laid end to end, as deep as three school buses stacked vertically.

The crater, now named McGetchin after a former director of Houston's Lunar and Planetary Institute, is three times larger than the previous record holder discovered by the same orbiter a decade earlier. It is, by current measurement, the biggest impact crater formed anywhere in the solar system in recent memory. What makes it scientifically extraordinary is not just its size but its rarity. An impact of this magnitude occurs, researchers estimate, only once every 132 years. "This event constitutes a statistically rare, effectively once-in-a-lifetime observation," the scientists wrote in one of two studies published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The moon has been pocked with craters since ancient times—some stretching more than 1,500 miles across—but a fresh wound this large, in this era, when humans are preparing to return and build a permanent base there, is something else entirely.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has circled the moon since 2009, captured the crater's image sometime between mid-April and late May 2024, shortly after formation. But the spacecraft's wide-angle photographs were buried in the deluge of data it continuously transmits. It took months of analysis before anyone recognized what those images contained. Once the crater was identified, the orbiter gathered more detailed pictures in the fall of 2024, and confirmation came early this year. Mark Robinson, chief scientist for the orbiter's camera system and lead author of one of the studies, works at Intuitive Machines. He and his colleagues found that the impact had churned the lunar surface for more than 66 miles, flinging dust and rocky soil outward at angles steeper than previous models had predicted.

A separate study, co-authored by David Paige of UCLA, identified a cold spot roughly four miles wide surrounding the new crater—evidence that the moon's topsoil had been loosened and overturned by the violence of impact. Paige described the phenomenon in terms of gardening: impacts, he suggested, function as a way to till the lunar regolith, bringing material from below to the surface and mixing what was once buried with what lies exposed. This churning happens faster than scientists previously understood. The orbiter's discoveries over the past fifteen years suggest that the moon's top inch of soil is completely overturned by ejected material every 80,000 years—quicker than earlier estimates had indicated. Robinson noted that this timeline has a sobering implication for the Apollo missions. The dusty footprints left by moonwalkers in the 1960s and 1970s, long imagined as permanent monuments to human exploration, will "definitely be long gone" within that span.

For NASA, the discovery carries immediate practical weight. The space agency is planning to establish a crewed lunar base, and engineers need to understand the hazards that fresh impacts pose. Material ejected from a crater can travel vast distances across the lunar surface. Robinson emphasized that the next step is calculating the risk of such ejected material striking the planned base. "That information will help engineers harden structures so one won't have to worry about damage, or maybe worry less," he said. The crater McGetchin, then, is not merely a scientific curiosity or a record-breaker. It is a warning and a teacher—evidence of the violent geology that will shape any human settlement on the moon, and a reminder that even in the vacuum of space, the ground beneath your feet is never truly still.