NASA discovers rare 'once-in-a-century' moon crater from 2024 impact

In the spring of 2024, something struck the moon. A chunk of rock or ice, somewhere between the size of a three-story building and a six-story one, came down hard enough to carve a scar 222 meters across into the lunar surface. For months, that crater sat there unmarked and unknown. It took until a NASA researcher named Robert Wagner was reviewing fresh orbital imagery to spot it—a bright smudge ringed by darker material, the unmistakable signature of fresh impact.

Wagner works with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a probe that has been circling the moon and mapping its face since 2009. When he saw that new crater in the data, he understood immediately what he was looking at. NASA would later name it McGetchin. The discovery matters not because the moon lacks craters—it is pocked with them, many far larger than this one—but because witnessing a crater's birth is rare. Scientists estimate that an impact large enough to leave a mark this size happens on the moon roughly once every hundred years, maybe longer. To catch one so soon after it formed is the kind of luck that shapes a research career.

On September 16, a study published in Science Advances confirmed what Wagner and his colleagues had determined: McGetchin is the largest new crater ever discovered anywhere in the solar system. The finding is not about size alone. It is about timing. Because the moon has almost no atmosphere to slow incoming objects or burn them up on approach, every impact there tells an unfiltered story about what happens when a celestial body collides with a planetary surface at full speed. Studying McGetchin while its formation is still fresh—while the physics of that collision are still readable in the rock and dust—gives scientists a window into how the moon's geology actually works.

That knowledge has immediate practical weight. The United States and China both have crewed lunar missions in their near-term plans. Astronauts walking on the moon need to understand the ground beneath their feet: how stable it is, how it responds to stress, what hazards it presents. A crater born just two years before its discovery, still radiating heat and settling into its final shape, offers lessons that older impacts cannot. The moon's surface is a record of billions of years of bombardment, but a fresh wound teaches differently than an ancient scar.

Wagner's discovery came through routine work—scanning images, looking for changes, the kind of patient attention that space agencies depend on. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been doing this same work for seventeen years, building a detailed map of the moon's surface and watching for the small but significant moments when that surface changes. McGetchin is the proof that the watching pays off. It is also a reminder that the moon, despite its stillness in our sky, remains an active place. Impacts still fall. Craters still form. And now, as humans prepare to return there, we are beginning to read what those impacts mean.