In the long story of worlds shaped by collision, the Moon quietly received a new wound in the spring of 2024 — one that went unnoticed for eighteen months until a careful human eye caught a glimmer of brightness in routine data. The McGetchin crater, stretching 222 meters wide and 43 meters deep on the Moon's eastern edge, is now recognized as the largest newly formed impact crater discovered anywhere in the Solar System. Its significance lies not only in its size, but in what it reveals: that a single cosmic strike can alter a world's surface far beyond the point of contact, reshaping soil, t
Scientists Discover Largest New Lunar Impact Crater in Solar System
A single strike had reshaped the landscape for kilometers
Mark
So Wagner just happened to spot this? There's no automated system that flags new craters?
Mimi
He was doing a routine scan of global lunar maps when the bright spot caught his eye. The source says he "stopped, dropped everything" — so it was visual recognition, not an algorithm. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been imaging the Moon for years, but comparing old images to new ones to find changes is still partly a human job.
Luke
Right, and that's worth noting. We don't know how many other new craters might have formed and not been spotted yet. This one was found because Wagner happened to be looking at that region on that day.
Mark
What makes this crater special beyond its size?
Mimi
The thermal signature. The cold spot extending six kilometers out — that tells us the impact didn't just make a hole. It fundamentally changed how the soil behaves. Looser material can't hold heat the way compacted regolith can.
Luke
But we should be careful here. The cold spot is about nine degrees Celsius cooler at night. That's measurable, but it's not catastrophic. And the source says the impact "altered" the surface far beyond the rim, but we're talking about changes in soil density and thermal properties — not visible destruction across that whole zone.
Mark
So the real story is that impacts have invisible effects?
Mimi
Exactly. You can see the crater. You can measure the cold spot with instruments. But the full extent of what changed — the disrupted geology, the altered regolith structure — that's what the papers are documenting. It's about understanding the mechanics.
Luke
And it's worth saying: this crater formed in 2024, but nobody knew about it until October 2025. That's a year and a half of it sitting there undetected. That speaks to how much of the Moon we're still discovering in real time.
Mark
Does this change how we think about lunar impacts?
Mimi
It refines the models. The researchers said the crater "informs current models of cratering mechanics." So we had theories about how impacts work, and now we have a fresh, well-documented example to test those theories against.
Luke
Though we should note: the papers are from 2026, which is very recent. We don't yet know what the full implications are. The discovery is solid, but the interpretation is still unfolding.
The Pulse
- A routine scan turned extraordinary when image specialist Robert Wagner spotted an anomalous bright spot ringed by a dark halo in NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data — a signal that something violent had recently happened on the Moon.
- The culprit was a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building, which struck the lunar surface between April and May 2024 and left a crater large enough to swallow two and a half football fields end to end.
- Thermal instruments revealed an unsettling ripple effect: a cold zone nearly six kilometers wide surrounded the crater, running nine degrees Celsius cooler at night because the impact had churned the soil into a looser, heat-shedding layer.
- The disturbance extended over a thousand times the crater's own radius, forcing scientists to reckon with how profoundly a single strike reshapes a world well beyond the visible scar.
- Two separate research teams published findings in Science Advances in 2026, each probing different dimensions of the McGetchin crater's geology and mechanics, collectively advancing models of how planetary bodies absorb and broadcast the force of cosmic bombardment.
In the long story of worlds shaped by collision, the Moon quietly received a new wound in the spring of 2024 — one that went unnoticed for eighteen months until a careful human eye caught a glimmer of brightness in routine data. The McGetchin crater, stretching 222 meters wide and 43 meters deep on the Moon's eastern edge, is now recognized as the largest newly formed impact crater discovered anywhere in the Solar System. Its significance lies not only in its size, but in what it reveals: that a single cosmic strike can alter a world's surface far beyond the point of contact, reshaping soil, temperature, and geology across distances that dwarf the crater itself.
On October 24, 2025, Robert Wagner was moving through familiar territory — scanning routine imagery from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter — when something made him stop. A bright spot on the lunar surface, encircled by a dark halo, demanded his full attention. What he had found would turn out to be the largest newly formed impact crater ever discovered in the Solar System.
The crater, named McGetchin in honor of pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, sits on the Moon's eastern edge. It spans 222 meters across and plunges 43 meters deep — the work of a comet or asteroid roughly the height of a three- to six-story building. The strike had occurred between April and May 2024, but nearly eighteen months passed before anyone noticed. The bright spot was the giveaway: fresh impacts pulverize rock and fling it outward, exposing darker material beneath and producing that unmistakable halo pattern.
Follow-up imaging from the orbiter's Narrow-Angle Camera confirmed the crater's shape and dimensions. But the more startling revelation came from the Diviner thermal instrument, which detected a cold spot roughly six kilometers wide around the impact site — running about nine degrees Celsius cooler than surrounding terrain at night. The impact had churned the lunar soil into a fluffier, less dense layer that sheds heat poorly, and this thermal shadow extended across an area more than a thousand times wider than the crater itself.
Two research teams published their findings in Science Advances in 2026, with Mark Robinson and Tyler Powell each leading separate examinations of what McGetchin revealed. Together, their work showed that major impacts do not simply carve holes — they ripple outward, altering soil density, thermal behavior, and exposed geology in ways invisible to the naked eye. Every new crater, it turns out, is less a wound than a window into how worlds everywhere bear and broadcast the force of cosmic collision.
On October 24, 2025, Robert Wagner was doing what he'd done hundreds of times before—scanning routine data from the Moon. Wagner works as an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines, analyzing pictures sent back by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. But this time, something stopped him cold. A bright spot appeared on the lunar surface, ringed by a dark halo like a target. He abandoned everything else and began investigating.
What Wagner had found was the largest newly formed impact crater ever discovered anywhere in the Solar System. The crater, now named McGetchin in honor of pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, sits on the Moon's eastern edge. It measures 222 meters across—roughly the length of two and a half football fields—and plunges 43 meters deep. A comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building had struck the lunar surface and left this scar behind.
The impact occurred sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, but no one noticed until Wagner spotted the telltale bright spot nearly eighteen months later. The brightness itself was a clue: when a fresh impact tears into the Moon, it throws pulverized rock outward, exposing darker material beneath and creating that distinctive halo pattern. Follow-up images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's Narrow-Angle Camera, which can resolve finer detail than the initial wide-view instrument, confirmed the crater's dimensions and shape.
But the crater's reach extended far beyond its rim. The orbiter's Diviner thermal instrument detected something unexpected: a cold spot roughly six kilometers wide surrounding the impact site. At night, this zone ran about nine degrees Celsius cooler than the surrounding terrain. The explanation lay in the impact's violence. The collision had churned up the lunar soil, making it fluffier and less dense than the undisturbed regolith around it. Looser material holds heat poorly, which is why the thermal camera picked up the temperature difference. A single strike had altered the Moon's surface properties across an area more than a thousand times wider than the crater itself.
The researchers described the findings in stark terms: the crater had exposed complex geology beneath the surface, provided new data to refine how scientists model impact mechanics, and documented widespread surface changes extending far beyond what the naked eye could see. Two separate papers published in Science Advances in 2026 laid out the discovery in detail, with one team led by Mark Robinson and another by Tyler Powell each examining different aspects of what the McGetchin crater revealed.
The discovery matters because it shows that major impacts do not simply carve holes. They reshape the landscape in ways that ripple outward, altering soil density, thermal properties, and the exposed layers of lunar geology. Every new crater offers a window into how planetary bodies respond to bombardment—knowledge that informs not just our understanding of the Moon, but of how worlds everywhere bear the scars of cosmic collisions.
Notable Quotes
I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was— Robert Wagner, image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines
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