September 19, 2026
NASA found a 728-foot crater on the Moon
LRO spotted McGetchin crater — a 2024 impact that sat in the maps until 2025.
In spring 2024 a comet or asteroid roughly the size of a three- to six-story building hit the Moon’s eastern edge. Nobody caught the flash. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter already had the scar in its images. It took a routine map check, months later, to see it.
What LRO found
On 24 October 2025, Robert Wagner — an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines working with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera — was stacking wide-angle “before” and “after” frames. Software flags every lighting shift. He looks for fuzzy halos around bright points, the splash of fresh regolith around a new crater.
This one spanned hundreds of pixels.
NASA’s write-up quotes Wagner: “I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was.” Comparing older and newer maps, the team had found the largest newly formed impact crater yet identified in the solar system. The papers landed in Science Advances on 15–16 September 2026.
The crater is officially named McGetchin after lunar scientist Tom McGetchin. It formed sometime between 11 April and 22 May 2024. It is 728 feet across (about two football fields) and 141 feet deep (three school buses stacked). NASA’s team estimates an impact of that size happens on the Moon about once a century, or less often.
LRO has been mapping the Moon for more than 17 years. The team has identified at least 1,000 new impact craters and flagged about 100,000 other surface changes. Most new holes are tiny. McGetchin is not.
A follow-up with LRO’s thermal instrument, Diviner, found a 4-mile-wide “cold spot” around the crater — about 16°F cooler at night than the ground beside it — because the impact fluffed the regolith so it holds less heat (second Science Advances paper). The splash is larger than the hole.
The Short
NASA Found a 728-Foot Crater on the Moon Nearly 2 Years Later, on JabMed AI Studios. The moving picture is an AI-assisted reconstruction. It is not LRO camera footage.
Where to read the record
- NASA: Moon orbiter spots new, once-in-century crater (Lonnie Shekhtman, 16 September 2026)
- Science Advances discovery paper
- Science Advances Diviner cold-spot paper
- USGS: McGetchin