--- title: The Largest New Crater in the Solar System Is on the Moon description: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter found the largest newly formed crater ever seen in the solar system, on the Moon's eastern edge. Here is what hit it. author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-09-17T15:06:00.556Z updated: 2026-09-17T15:06:00.565Z canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/largest-new-crater-solar-system-moon-mcgetchin image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/mcgetchin-lunar-crater-309393.webp categories: Science & Tech content_type: News region: Global publication: Sovereign Magazine schema_type: Article --- Robert Wagner was scanning a large Moon map on his screen, running the kind of data-quality check that usually passes without incident, when a bright spot ringed by a dark halo stopped him cold. The halo meant something had shaken up the surface there. Wagner, an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines who works with pictures from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, knew that pattern did not belong. "I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was," Wagner said. What he had spotted was the largest newly formed crater ever found anywhere in the solar system. It sits on the Moon's eastern limb, and it was not there a little over a year earlier. NASA [reported the find](https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/moon/nasas-moon-orbiter-spots-new-once-in-century-moon-crater/) on September 15, 2026, in the first of a pair of papers in the journal Science Advances. ## A Building-Sized Space Rock Carved the Crater in Spring 2024 The crater formed between April 11 and May 22, 2024, when an object roughly the size of a three- to six-story building slammed into the surface. The strike left a bowl 728 feet across, about the length of two football fields, and 141 feet deep, enough to stack three school buses vertically inside it. In metric, that is about 222 meters wide. Scientists estimate an impact of this size hits the Moon about once a century, and possibly less often. The crater now carries an official name, McGetchin, after the pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin. ## The Bright Spot That Caught Wagner's Eye Was Not the Crater The white smear that first pulled Wagner's attention was material thrown out of the crater by the force of the impact, spread across the surface around the fresh hole. He confirmed it by lining up before-and-after images of the same ground. The "before" view came from Wide-Angle Camera pictures taken in the spring of 2011, and the "after" view from the summer of 2025. The patch of Moon shown in those frames is 38 miles wide. ## The Orbiter Behind the Find Has Circled the Moon for 17 Years NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has circled the Moon for more than 17 years, carrying seven instruments that map its topography, surface composition, temperature, and radiation. Over the mission, the team has identified at least 1,000 new impact craters and flagged another 100,000 surface changes caused by impacts or their debris. Most of that activity is far smaller than McGetchin. The tiniest craters the orbiter can resolve are about 30 feet wide, gouged by rocks roughly 43 inches across, about the size of a monster-truck tire. Impacts at that scale carve around 140 new craters across the Moon every year. Most fresh craters come from projectiles too small to see from orbit at all. ## A Cold Spot Surrounds the Fresh Crater Once the crater was on the map, scientists turned the orbiter's thermal instrument, Diviner, toward it and found a patch of ground four miles wide surrounding the crater that runs about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than the terrain around it. The cold comes from the strike itself, which fluffed up the regolith, the loose material blanketing the surface, leaving it less dense and slower to give up heat after sundown. The team described the cold spot in a second paper, published on September 16, 2026, in Science Advances. ## FAQ **Q: Is this the biggest crater on the Moon?** No. The Moon is covered in far larger, ancient craters. McGetchin is the largest one ever seen freshly formed, the biggest new impact scientists have caught and confirmed while watching the Moon from orbit, not the biggest crater overall. **Q: How did scientists confirm the crater's size and shape?** Wagner first spotted it on October 24, 2025, in the Wide-Angle Camera's broad views, where each pixel covers about the area of a football field. The team then pointed the orbiter's sharper Narrow-Angle Camera at the site, which images the surface at about 3 feet per pixel, and those passes revealed the crater's size, shape and the terrain the impact had disturbed. **Q: Why does a new crater like this matter for future Moon missions?** The impact reshaped the surface well beyond the crater itself, as the four-mile cold spot shows, and NASA says changes like that could affect how a rover's wheels grip the ground. Tracking fresh impacts also shows how much the lunar surface is still changing as the agency plans a longer human presence there.