Newly Discovered "Once-in-a-Century' Moon Crater Larger Than Two Football Fields

Robert Wagner, a researcher working on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), was performing a data-quality check when he saw it — a large spot on the moon.

“I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” Wagner, who is also an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines and works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) system, said in a press release.

A dark halo of debris surrounded the bright spot, indicating that the surface material on that part of the moon had changed. Wagner then compared before-and-after images of that spot and confirmed the discovery of a new crater. But not just any crater; this impact turned out to be the largest newly formed crater ever found in the Solar System, according to NASA. More on these findings has been published in Science Advances.

Read More: New Images Show the 60-Foot Crater a SpaceX Rocket Left on the Moon

Football How Big Is the McGetchin Crater?

The moon is full of craters, many of which are the result of impacts from asteroids and comets. However, few are ever this large, according to NASA. This is likely a once-in-a-century impact.

Wagner and team named the crater after Tom McGetchin, a pioneering lunar scientist who worked during the Apollo missions, according to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) team.

From what Wagner and team could tell, the crater formed between April 11, 2024, and May 22, 2024, likely from a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building, according to NASA. The impactor left a crater that is about 728 feet wide, over the length of two football fields. It’s also about 141 feet deep and could easily fit three vertically stacked school buses inside, according to NASA.

Football Why Is It So Easy for Objects to Hit the Moon?

During its 17 years in service, the LRO has continuously circled and mapped the moon and identified new impacts and other surface changes. So far, the LRO has mapped about 1,000 new impact craters and flagged over 100,000 changes in the surface, likely caused by impacts or debris it spread, according to NASA.

Unlike Earth, the moon has no atmosphere that could help slow down incoming space rocks or other objects. Luckily, most of the time, the rocks that do strike the moon are much smaller than the one that created McGetchin.

The LRO can distinguish even small impact craters that are about 30 feet wide. The rocks that create these craters are about 43 inches wide — or the size of a monster truck tire, according to NASA. From what researchers using LRO can estimate, these smaller rock strikes make up about 140 new lunar craters each year. There are likely more strikes than that; they are just too small for the LRO to detect.

Football What Happened After McGetchin Was Created?

Further research, published in a separate Science Advances study, found that a 4-mile-wide area around McGetchin is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than the rest of its surroundings. This is due to the impact “fluffing” up the regolith around the crater. The regolith becomes less dense and retains heat less easily.

The research team found these results to be remarkable, as they show that larger lunar impacts can change the moon’s surface beyond the crater and could even change how lunar rover tires interact with the surface, according to NASA.

The LRO continues to orbit the moon, gathering data that could help with further lunar missions and help us better understand our natural satellite.

Read More: Small Lunar Towns Could Sustain Themselves on the Moon’s Water for Centuries

Article Sources

Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:

• This article references information from a study published in Science Advances: A new 222-m diameter lunar crater
• This article references information from a study published in Science Advances: New lunar crater reveals extensive distal regolith modification
• This article references information from NASA: NASA’s Moon Orbiter Spots New, ‘Once-in-Century’ Moon Crater
• This article references information from LROC: Spectacular McGetchin Crater