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On 16 September 2026 NASA announced that its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had found a new crater on the Moon's near side, formed between 11 April and 22 May 2024.
Named McGetchin after Thomas McGetchin, a former director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, it is about 222 m wide and up to 43 m deep. It is the largest newly formed crater found in the solar system.
It is about three times the size of LRO's previous record. The impactor, an asteroid or comet the size of a 3-6 storey building, went unnoticed by telescopes.
The impact threw out material more than 100 km away and left a cold spot about 7 km wide of loosened regolith. The findings appeared in two Science Advances studies.
Regolith is the loose layer of broken rock and dust covering airless bodies. The impact fluffed it up, and less dense regolith holds heat poorly, so the area around McGetchin cools faster at night than its surroundings.
Simple Analogy: Fluffed-up soil cools faster than packed soil.
NASA orbiter mapping the Moon's surface, illumination, radiation and composition since 2009; its before-and-after images revealed the crater
Planetary science research institute; Thomas McGetchin, after whom the crater is named, was a former director
India's lunar orbiter, launched in July 2019, also carries high-resolution cameras that can detect surface changes like new craters
An impactor several storeys high reached the Moon unseen, which shows how hard small near-Earth objects are to spot
GS Paper III > Science & Technology > Space
General Awareness > Science
The Moon's rotation period equals its orbital period, so the same near side always faces Earth
The loose surface layer of fragmented rock, dust and impact debris
Comparing before-and-after images to find new surface features