NASA spots rare moon crater the size of the Colosseum from 2024 impact

Two years before NASA's cameras caught sight of it, something massive struck the moon. In May 2024, an asteroid or comet fragment slammed into the lunar surface near side, carving out a crater roughly 220 meters across and plunging as deep as 45 meters down—a hole large enough to swallow Rome's Colosseum whole. The impact went unnoticed at first. Telescopes on Earth and in orbit failed to detect it in real time. It was only when NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reviewed its wide-angle images months later, in August 2025, that scientists recognized what had happened. The data had been there all along, buried in the deluge of information the spacecraft continuously collects. By early 2026, after the orbiter gathered more detailed photographs and researchers confirmed the discovery, the scientific community understood what they were looking at: the largest impact crater formed on the moon in recent memory.

The crater now bears the name of Thomas McGetchin, a former director of Houston's Lunar and Planetary Institute. It dwarfs the previous record holder, a crater the same spacecraft identified a decade earlier—McGetchin is three times larger. To put the scale in perspective, the moon has been pummeled by impacts since ancient times, scarred with some of the solar system's most enormous craters, including one that stretches more than 2,400 kilometers across. Yet this recent strike stands apart not because of its absolute size but because of when it happened and what it tells us about the frequency of such events.

Researchers estimate that impacts of this magnitude occur roughly once every 132 years. That rarity makes this discovery extraordinary. "This event constitutes a statistically rare, effectively once-in-a-lifetime observation," scientists wrote in one of two studies published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. For NASA and other space agencies planning to establish a human presence on the moon, the timing could hardly be better. The crater offers a window into how the lunar surface responds to violent collision—information that will prove essential as engineers design habitats and infrastructure meant to withstand the moon's harsh environment.

The impact's violence extended far beyond the crater itself. The collision churned the lunar surface across more than 100 kilometers, hurling dust and rocky soil outward at angles steeper than scientists had predicted based on previous models. Mark Robinson, chief scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's camera systems and lead author of one of the studies, noted this unexpected behavior. Robinson works for Intuitive Machines, the company that operates the spacecraft's imaging instruments. The ejected material—the debris field spread across the moon's face—provides researchers with rare, direct evidence of how celestial bodies respond to high-velocity impact, data that would be difficult or impossible to gather any other way.

The discovery underscores how much remains hidden in plain sight. A crater the size of a major Roman monument formed on Earth's nearest neighbor, and humanity's instruments captured it, yet the scientific community took more than a year to recognize what the data showed. It is a reminder that even with sophisticated spacecraft in orbit and advanced analysis techniques, the solar system still holds surprises—and that sometimes the most significant findings emerge not from dramatic real-time observation but from patient, methodical review of information already in hand.