A space rock roughly as large as a three- to six-story building struck the Moon and carved out a crater about 728 feet wide—long enough to span two football fields. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter did not watch the impact happen. A researcher found the fresh scar by comparing old and new lunar images, after a bright patch caught his eye during a routine data-quality check.
The impact happened sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024. The crater, now named McGetchin, is about 141 feet deep. NASA describes an impact of this scale as roughly a once-in-a-century event on the Moon. It is a remarkable natural collision, not an unexplained one: the evidence points to an ordinary space rock meeting a world with no atmosphere to burn it up.
The discovery has a wonderfully tangible payoff. A landscape we usually imagine as frozen in time changed dramatically, and the clue was hiding in plain sight until someone compared the right images.
A bright spot led to a crater two football fields wide
On October 24, 2025, LRO imaging specialist Robert Wagner was checking a global map assembled from hundreds of lunar images. One bright spot surrounded by a dark halo looked different from the usual noise caused by shifting shadows or lighting. Wagner stopped to investigate. Follow-up, sharper images showed the crater and the debris thrown outward when the impact happened.
That distinction matters: the bright patch is not the crater itself. It is material blasted out around it. The crater’s size and shape became clear in higher-resolution images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. NASA’s official before-and-after comparison and close-up images show the difference far better than a headline can.
McGetchin was named for Tom McGetchin, a pioneering lunar scientist. NASA’s account says the object may have been a comet or asteroid fragment, and estimates its size by comparing it to a three- to six-story building. That is an estimate based on the impact evidence, not a photograph of the object approaching.
The Moon gets hit more often than this makes it sound
“Once in a century” applies to an impact on this scale, not to every pebble that reaches the lunar surface. With no substantial atmosphere to slow incoming objects, the Moon is constantly collecting smaller impacts. NASA says its orbiter has identified at least 1,000 new craters during the mission and flagged many more surface changes.
Most are far smaller than McGetchin. NASA estimates that impacts leave about 140 new craters across the Moon each year that are large enough to distinguish in the orbiter’s imagery. Tiny projectiles create pits too small to pick out from orbit. The new crater stands out because the incoming object was large enough to reshape a conspicuous patch of terrain.
That is also why this is a useful comparison for science-fiction fans. Lunar battle scenes often treat the surface as an empty gray stage. In reality, impacts sculpt it over time, and their effects extend beyond the neat circular hole that a movie might show.
The impact changed a wider area than the crater
Researchers also used the orbiter’s Diviner instrument to examine the crater’s thermal surroundings. They found a cooler area about four miles across, with nighttime temperatures roughly 16 degrees Fahrenheit below those of nearby ground. The impact loosened and “fluffed up” the soil, making it less dense and less able to hold heat.
So the event left two visible stories: a dramatic crater and a much broader thermal signature. That wider change could matter for future lunar exploration because surface texture affects how rover wheels interact with the ground. It is not a prediction that a rover will become stuck there; it is a reason scientists want to understand what impacts do to lunar soil.
Finding it took patience, not a mystery signal
The crater was not discovered through a strange flash in real time or a hidden message in the lunar landscape. Wagner found it by comparing images collected years apart. Software helps flag changes, but shifts in lighting and shadows create false alarms, so researchers still have to inspect likely features by eye.
NASA says LRO’s wide-angle maps can reveal large changes, while its narrow-angle camera provides much sharper views when a possible feature needs closer examination. In McGetchin’s case, the routine map check led to targeted imaging that confirmed the crater’s dimensions and surrounding ejecta.
That makes the story less mysterious, and more satisfying. A familiar world can still surprise us when we look at it carefully enough. Somewhere between two passes of a spacecraft, a building-sized object struck the Moon, leaving a scar wide enough to cover two football fields. Months later, a bright smudge on a map gave one scientist a reason to stop scrolling and look closer.
Sources: NASA Science: McGetchin crater discovery and image comparisons; the related research papers in Science Advances.
