Moon

NASA finds moon crater from a 2024 impact that hit unnoticed

Scientists have discovered a crater on the moon that is bigger than the Roman Colosseum, created when a massive collision struck the surface two years ago without being noticed at first, CBS News reports. NASA indicates the steep-sided hole measures roughly 728 feet in diameter, comparable to two football fields laid end to end, with a depth reaching 141 feet, or about the height of three yellow school buses stacked vertically.

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A routine data check turned up the impact#

Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines who works with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera data, was performing a data-quality check when an unusually bright spot ringed by a dark halo caught his eye on a lunar map, indicating disturbed surface material, according to Discover Magazine and ScienceDaily. "I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was," Wagner said, according to ScienceDaily and Discover Magazine.

Comparing before-and-after images confirmed a newly formed crater, which researchers named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, a former director of Houston's Lunar and Planetary Institute, CBS News reports. The impact struck the moon's near side sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, when a comet or asteroid fragment comparable to a structure spanning three to six stories collided with the lunar surface, but the strike escaped real-time detection by telescopes on Earth and in space, per CBS News.

Until August 2025, the orbiter's wide-angle photographs had escaped notice amid the volume of incoming data. According to CBS News and the Los Angeles Times, the LRO obtained higher-resolution photographs during the previous autumn, with the finding verified in the opening months of this year.

Findings appear in two new studies#

Two studies on the crater appeared September 16 in the journal Science Advances, one led by Mark Robinson of Intuitive Machines describing the crater and the material thrown across the surface, and a second examining a wider region altered by the impact using data from LRO's Diviner instrument, Space.com reports. "McGetchin crater is exceptional because it is the largest newly formed impact crater that has been identified to date," according to Tyler Powell, who authored one of the studies and spoke with Space.com.

Researchers estimate that impacts of this magnitude happen roughly once per 132 years, CBS News reported, and the crater dwarfs the previous record set by LRO a decade earlier, being three times larger. The blast disturbed terrain extending beyond 66 miles across the moon, ejecting dust and rocky soil at a steeper trajectory than scientists had anticipated, Mark Robinson, the LRO camera team's chief scientist, said, per the Los Angeles Times.

During LRO's 17 years in service, the orbiter has identified roughly 1,000 new impact craters and detected more than 100,000 additional surface changes likely caused by impacts or scattered debris, according to Discover Magazine.

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