NASA spots biggest new crater ever found in the solar system
ASpaceX-era debris created the largest newly identified lunar crater, McGetchin, formed between April 11 and May 22, 2024, by an object roughly the size of a three- to six-story building. Discovered in late 2025 by image analyst Robert Wagner, the crater measures 728 feet across and 141 feet deep, with NASA’s LRO confirming its scale and morphology. The finding, published in Science Advances, marks a rare event in the solar system and offers insights from a 4-mile-wide cooling halo around the site, detected by Diviner. Located on the moon’s eastern limb and thus out of view from Earth, McGetchin is named after lunar scientist Tom McGetchin. The result enhances understanding of impact processes and lunar surface responses, with further study anticipated as more data are analyzed.
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Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines, spotted the unusual bright spot during a routine 2025 data review while scanning a lunar map.
Wagner used stacking of hundreds of before-and-after frames from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera to identify changes, looking for halos around pixel-wide bright points as signatures of fresh debris.
McGetchin crater is 728 feet in diameter and about 141 feet deep, making it the largest newly formed crater identified in the solar system to date.
The crater formed sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, when a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building struck the lunar surface.
A 4-mile-wide region around the crater shows a nighttime temperature drop of roughly 16 degrees Fahrenheit, indicating altered soil properties after the impact.
Diviner, NASA’s thermal instrument, revealed the cooler halo and indicated the impact compacted and fluff-up lunar soil, reducing its ability to retain heat overnight.
McGetchin is on the moon’s eastern limb, an area not visible from Earth, and has been officially named in honor of pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin.