NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter discovered a crater on the moon's near side roughly 728 feet across and up to 141 feet deep, a find scientists call a once-in-a-lifetime event with real implications for future lunar bases.
The crater, about the length of two football fields and deeper than three school buses stacked end to end, dwarfs the Roman Colosseum. It formed sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, when a chunk of asteroid or comet the size of a three- to six-story building slammed into the lunar surface. No telescope on Earth or in space caught the impact in real time. The orbiter picked it up in wide-angle images, but researchers did not identify the crater in the data until August 2025.
Two peer-reviewed studies published in the journal *Science Advances* detail the discovery and its consequences. The crater is three times bigger than the previous record-holder found by the same orbiter roughly a decade ago. Scientists involved in the research described the event as "a statistically rare, effectively once-in-a-lifetime observation."
The collision did far more than punch a hole. It churned the moon's surface for more than 66 miles in every direction, hurling dust and rocky soil at a higher angle than researchers expected. A separate study co-authored by David Paige of the University of California, Los Angeles, identified a cold spot roughly four miles wide surrounding the crater, evidence of how violently the impact disrupted the ground.
Paige framed the finding in practical terms. In a statement, he said:
"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."
That "gardening" effect rewrites estimates of how fast the moon's topsoil turns over. Mark Robinson, chief scientist for the orbiter's cameras and lead author of the companion study, said the data show the moon's top inch of soil is being overturned by ejected material every 80,000 years, faster than scientists previously believed.
Robinson, who works at Intuitive Machines, noted the turnover rate carries a blunt consequence for the Apollo program's legacy. The dusty footprints left behind by American moonwalkers will, in his words, "definitely be long gone in that time frame."
NASA is preparing to send astronauts back to the moon and build a permanent base there. Robinson identified the next critical step: calculating the risk that ejected crater material from future impacts could strike that base. In an email, he laid out the stakes plainly:
"That information will help engineers harden structures so one won't have to worry about damage, or maybe worry less."
The moon already bears craters on a staggering scale, one stretches more than 1,500 miles across. But the new find matters because it was fresh enough to study in detail and large enough to reshape thinking about how often such events occur. Researchers estimate impacts of this magnitude happen roughly once every 132 years.
The crater has been named for Thomas McGetchin, the late former director of Houston's Lunar and Planetary Institute. The orbiter that found it has circled the moon since 2009, quietly building the most detailed map of the lunar surface ever assembled.
The timeline underscores a gap worth noting. The impact occurred in spring 2024. The orbiter captured it shortly after. Yet the images sat unidentified for more than a year before anyone flagged the crater. Confirmation came early this year, and the studies followed months later. A building-sized object hit the moon hard enough to reshape 66 miles of terrain, and nobody noticed until long after the fact.
For a space agency planning to put people on that surface, the discovery is less a curiosity than a warning label. If the goal is a permanent American presence on the moon, the engineering had better account for what the moon keeps throwing at itself, whether anyone is watching or not.
