NASA spots biggest new crater ever found in the solar system
A building-size rock hit the moon in 2024, and NASA scientists have just announced the crater it left behind.
New images show the aftermath of a SpaceX rocket impact on the moon following an Aug. 5 crash.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has circled the moon for more than 17 years and helped identify at least 1,000 new impact craters. But the 728-foot crater that scientist Robert Wagner spotted during a routine data-quality check is in another category: An impact this big happens about once a century and possibly less often than that.
In the first image, a zoomed-in view of McGetchin crater, circled, and in the second image a “before” image. The white spot is not the crater itself, but rather material flung out of the crater, which formed when a rock, crashed into the Moon between April 11 and May 22, 2024 (Image: NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines/Robert Wagner)
Wagner was scanning a giant map of the moon on his computer screen in October 2025 when an unusually large bright spot ringed by a dark halo caught his eye.
"I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was," said Wagner, an image-processing specialist with Intuitive Machines who works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera.
An overhead view of the McGetchin crater taken on Dec. 5, 2025 by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Narrow-Angle Camera. (Image: NASA/LRO)
At 141 feet deep and 728 feet across, it is the largest, newly formed crater ever found in the solar system, scientists reported in a pair of studies published in Science Advances. Now officially named McGetchin, after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the moon's eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, when a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building slammed into the surface.
A side view of the McGetchin crater looking east taken on March 3, 2026 by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Narrow-Angle Camera. (Image: NASA/LRO)
Wagner found it by stacking hundreds of before-and-after frames from LRO's Wide-Angle Camera using software that highlights change. Anything that stayed the same turns gray, while anything different shows up as a bright or dark patch. The software throws off hundreds of false alarms, so Wagner looks for small fuzzy halos around pixel-wide bright points, the signature of fresh debris thrown out of a new crater.
"It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I've ever seen in one of these images," he said.
This animated image set shows an area on the eastern limb of the moon before and after McGetchin crater formed there sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024. The post-impact image was constructed using data taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) thermal instrument, Diviner, between Nov. 15, 2025, and Feb. 18, 2026. The dark blue strip that flashes into view reveals a 4-mile-wide “cold spot” around the crater that is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than its surroundings. The red and yellow spots indicate areas typically associated with rocks excavated by long-ago impacts which, though still at cryogenic temperatures like their surroundings, remain slightly warmer at night. (Image: NASA Goddard/UCLA/JHU APL)
The impact left its mark well beyond the crater rim. Following up on Wagner's discovery, LRO's thermal instrument, Diviner, found a 4-mile-wide area around the crater running about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than its surroundings. The impact fluffed up the lunar soil, NASA said, making it less dense and less able to hold heat overnight.
For those hoping to look up at the new moon crater, you're out of luck. The new crater is on the eastern limb not visible from Earth.
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