The Moon Just Took Its Biggest Fresh Hit in Decades
An asteroid fragment gouged a 222-metre crater into the Moon in early 2024 and nobody saw it happen. NASA's orbiter only found the scar a year and a half later.
The Discovery
Something the size of a small apartment block slammed into the Moon between 11 April and 22 May 2024 — and no telescope caught it in the act. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter only found the aftermath, spotting a bright new scar during routine before-and-after imaging in late 2025.
The crater measures about 222 metres across and 43 metres deep, wider than the Colosseum. Two studies in Science Advances describe it as the largest fresh impact crater the orbiter has ever documented anywhere in the Solar System.
A building-sized rock carved a stadium-sized hole, unwatched.
What Makes It Strange
Impacts this large are supposed to be rare. Cratering models suggest a fresh scar of this scale should appear only about once every 132 years. The new crater is roughly three times wider than the previous record holder the orbiter found — a 70-metre crater dated to 2012.
The International Astronomical Union named it McGetchin crater, after lunar scientist Thomas McGetchin. It sits on the eastern near side, close to where ancient highlands meet older volcanic plains. Its bright ejecta blanket and freshly exposed geology make it a rare pristine sample, so far untouched by space weathering.
The Ripples It Left
The blast did far more than dig a hole. A companion study reports that the impact reshaped the surface well beyond the rim — out past 1,000 crater radii, with debris effects traced more than 120 kilometres away.
The orbiter's heat-sensing instrument also found a 7-kilometre cold spot ringing the crater, where night-time temperatures run about 8 to 9 kelvin cooler than the surroundings. Researchers link that chill to loosened, less dense regolith thrown out and disturbed by the strike.
What Happens Next
Because the crater is so young, it offers a clean laboratory for studying how impacts modify the lunar surface before erosion blurs the evidence. That matters for anyone planning future bases: the same models that predicted an event this rare also estimate how often the next one might arrive.
The Moon took a serious hit. The record simply waited a year and a half to be read.