NASA Found the McGetchin Moon Crater, Bigger Than the Colosseum

In the spring of 2024, a chunk of rock the size of a small building hit the moon and blew a hole in it wider than two football fields. That hole is the McGetchin moon crater, and nobody saw it form. No telescope on Earth or in space caught the impact in real time, and it took more than a year before anyone noticed the damage at all.

The McGetchin moon crater got its name from the late Thomas McGetchin, a former director of Houston's Lunar and Planetary Institute. It sits on the moon's eastern edge, spans 222 meters across and reaches 43 meters deep, making it larger than the Roman Colosseum. Researchers pinned the impact to a window between April 11 and May 22, 2024, when a fragment of an asteroid or comet about three to six stories tall struck the surface. Impacts this size hit the moon roughly once every 132 years. In one of two new studies on the find, published September 17 in the journal Science Advances, the authors called the McGetchin moon crater "a statistically rare, effectively once-in-a-lifetime observation."

How a strike this big stayed hidden

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter actually photographed the McGetchin moon crater's location in May 2024, shortly after it formed. The moon strike simply escaped real-time detection by every telescope on Earth and in space. The LRO's wide-angle images got buried in the data crush and went unflagged until August 2025. It was Robert Wagner, a researcher working with the LRO team, who finally spotted the odd bright spot ringed by a dark halo during a routine data-quality check on October 24, 2025. Detailed images followed that fall, and the discovery was confirmed early this year, according to the Associated Press report carried by the Weather Channel: weather.com/2026/09/17/science/space/nasa-discovers-new-impact-crater-on-moon.

A close-up taken December 5, 2025, by the LRO's Narrow-Angle Camera shows the McGetchin moon crater in sharp relief: steep walls, a broad debris field, and the unmistakable signature of fresh excavation on a surface that looks, from a distance, like nothing ever changes. Phys.org, reporting on the same discovery, noted that its 222-meter width tops the Roman Colosseum: phys.org/news/2026-09-nasa-spacecraft-huge-crater-moon.html.

A strike three times bigger than the last record holder

The McGetchin moon crater is three times bigger than the previous fresh-impact record holder, which the LRO found a decade ago. That makes it the solar system's biggest known impact crater carved out in recent times, a distinction that matters because modern craters let scientists watch the geology happen instead of reconstructing it from billion-year-old scars.

The two Science Advances studies, out this week, describe a blast that churned the lunar surface for more than 66 miles. Mark Robinson, the chief scientist for the LRO's cameras at Intuitive Machines and lead author of one study, said dust and rocky soil were hurled away at a higher angle than expected. A second study found a 4-mile-wide cold spot around the McGetchin moon crater, consistent with a loosening of the moon's top soil. Co-author David Paige of UCLA described the finding in plain terms: "We're now thinking of impacts as a way to garden the regolith, churning the sediments and putting stuff above that's usually below the surface."

The LRO's crater discoveries since its 2009 launch also changed a long-standing number: the moon's top inch of soil now appears to be overturned by ejected material roughly every 80,000 years, faster than previously thought. That has an unexpectedly poetic consequence. The Apollo moonwalkers' footprints, widely assumed to last forever, "will definitely be long gone in that time frame," Robinson said in an email. GenZNewZ recently took apart another stubborn myth with its debunking of 9/11 conspiracy theories 25 years later: genznewz.com/911-conspiracy-theories-debunked-25-years-later.

Why the Artemis moon base should care

The discovery lands right as NASA prepares to build a base for astronauts on the moon. Robinson's team says the next step is calculating the risk that ejected crater material from a similar strike could hit a future base. "That information will help engineers harden structures so one won't have to worry about damage, or maybe worry less," he said. For the architects of the Artemis missions, designing buildings on a world where house-sized rocks fall from the sky every century or so, the McGetchin moon crater is a data point worth studying.

The whole episode is a reminder that the moon is not the quiet museum piece it looks like from a backyard telescope. It is still being renovated, loudly, on a schedule nobody fully controls, and this time the before and after photos exist. For more science coverage like this, read GenZNewZ's recent reporting on how houseplants improve air quality (genznewz.com/houseplants-improve-air-quality-more-than-anyone-expected) or browse the site's science topic page: genznewz.com/topic/science.