NASA names McGetchin, a 222-metre crater that formed on the Moon in 2024

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has confirmed a new crater on the Moon's near side that formed between 11 April and 22 May 2024. Two papers in Science Advances, released on 16 September 2026, describe the hole as 728 feet (222 metres) across and 141 feet (43 metres) deep. The authors call it the largest newly formed impact crater yet identified in the solar system.

The crater is named McGetchin, after Thomas McGetchin, a former director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines who works with LROC data, spotted a bright patch while comparing wide-angle frames. He stopped what he was doing and went back through the archive. The white mark in the later mosaic is not the pit itself. It is ejecta thrown across a scene about 38 miles wide.

The impactor was a fragment of asteroid or comet, estimated at the size of a three- to six-storey building. The Moon has almost no atmosphere to slow such an object. An event of this scale is expected about once every 100 to 132 years. The previous LRO record-holder, found a decade ago, is about a third as wide.

Found late, measured in detail

LRO imaged the site in May 2024, soon after the strike. No Earth-based or space telescope logged the flash in real time. The wide-angle frames sat in the data pile until August 2025. The spacecraft then took narrower shots last autumn. Confirmation came earlier this year. The public papers arrived this week.

The Diviner instrument recorded a cold patch about four miles across around the crater. Fresh ejecta and overturned regolith change how the surface holds heat. That thermal scar is part of why the site matters for anyone planning to live or park hardware on the Moon. A rock the size of a small building can rearrange the ground well beyond the rim.

NASA is preparing a sustained presence under Artemis. Site selection, habitat design and debris models all use impact rates. A once-in-a-century crater that nobody saw happen is a reminder that the rate is a statistic, not a schedule. The next one can arrive in the next decade or after 2100. The engineering problem is the same either way: shielding, burial depth and the decision to put tanks or crew quarters in a place that looks quiet in today's photographs.

What the number 222 metres buys

The Colosseum comparison used in some dispatches is a size check, not a tourist note. A pit 222 metres wide and 43 metres deep would swallow a large pad and the roads around it. Three school buses stacked vertically would fit in the depth. Two American football fields would fit in the width. Those are the scales habitat planners now have as a measured, dated example rather than as a model run.

Wagner's find also says something about how lunar science works in 2026. The orbiter has been flying since 2009. The archive is large enough that a crater this size can hide in it for a year. The method that caught McGetchin is brute comparison of before and after mosaics. It will catch the next one too, if the next one is on the near side and in the camera's path.

The far side is less well watched from Earth. A similar strike there could wait longer for an orbiter pass. For the crews NASA wants to land this decade, the useful sentence in the Science Advances papers is the one about frequency. A century-class impact happened in 2024 and was noticed in 2025. Planning documents that treated that class as abstract now have a named hole, a depth and a date range.