NASA Scientist Finds the Largest Newly Formed Crater Ever Recorded in the Solar System

By Boggle Riley, File Zero | September 17, 2026

Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist working with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, discovered the largest newly formed crater ever found in the solar system on the Moon's eastern edge, NASA said Wednesday, after a comet or asteroid struck the surface sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024.

What Wagner Found

It started as a data-quality check. Wagner, who works for Intuitive Machines and processes images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera system, was scanning a large Moon map on his screen when a bright spot ringed by a dark halo stopped him cold.

"I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was," Wagner said, according to the NASA Science page published Wednesday.

By comparing images taken before and after the bright spot appeared, Wagner confirmed he had found something no one had recorded before: a fresh crater 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep, according to NASA. The agency says that width spans the length of two football fields, and that the depth could fit three school buses stacked end to end.

The crater is now officially named McGetchin, after lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, NASA said.

The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

How Big a Deal Is This

NASA estimates that an impact large enough to carve out a crater of this size happens on the Moon roughly once a century, or even less often.

The object that made it was, by NASA's estimate, the size of a three- to six-story building. That is far larger than the typical impactor LRO tracks. NASA says the smallest craters the orbiter can pick out in its images run about 30 feet wide, made by rocks roughly 43 inches across, and that impacts at that scale produce around 140 new craters across the Moon each year. McGetchin is in a different category entirely.

The Moon has no atmosphere to slow incoming rocks or burn them up before they hit, so even modest-sized objects reach the surface at full speed. That is the basic physics behind why the Moon's surface keeps changing, and why continuous monitoring matters.

What the Thermal Data Showed

After Wagner flagged the crater, scientists working with Diviner, LRO's thermal instrument, took follow-up readings of the site. What they found extended the story well past the crater rim.

A zone roughly four miles wide around McGetchin runs about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than the surrounding surface, according to NASA. A second paper, also published Wednesday in Science Advances, explains why: the impact loosened and fluffed up the regolith, the loose surface material, across that entire area, making it less dense and less able to hold heat after the Sun goes down.

NASA notes that this "cold spot" matters for practical reasons. Looser, less dense regolith behaves differently under rover wheels, which is the kind of detail mission planners need as NASA works toward sustained human presence on the Moon.

What LRO Has Been Doing

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the Moon for more than 17 years, NASA said, carrying seven instruments that map the surface's topography, composition, temperature and radiation environment. Over that time, the spacecraft's team has identified at least 1,000 new impact craters and flagged more than 100,000 surface changes caused either by direct impacts or by the debris those impacts throw outward.

McGetchin is the largest of those finds by a significant margin.

What Is Not Yet Known

The exact date of the impact is not in the record. NASA has established that it happened between April 11 and May 22, 2024, but the precise moment has not been confirmed.

What Comes Next

NASA is advancing plans for sustained human presence on the Moon under its Artemis program. The agency has not announced a specific follow-up mission tied to the McGetchin crater site, and no such mission appears in the material published Wednesday. Continued monitoring by LRO is ongoing, NASA said, and the spacecraft remains in operation.

The McGetchin discovery is a good example of what long-duration orbital monitoring can turn up. A routine image check found the biggest fresh crater anyone has ever recorded in the solar system. That is not a small thing, and the people who built and operate LRO have earned the credit for it.

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