NASA’s Moon orbiter finds a 728-foot crater that wasn’t there before
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter identified a massive, newly formed crater on the Moon, measuring 728 feet wide. The crater, named McGetchin, was created by an asteroid or comet impact between April and May 2024.
Why it matters
This discovery highlights the utility of long-term lunar monitoring and provides rare data on the frequency of significant impacts on the Moon's surface.
A routine check of NASA lunar data unexpectedly led to a major discovery.
Robert Wagner, a scientist who works with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), was examining a large map of the Moon when something unusual stood out on his computer screen. He noticed an unusually bright patch surrounded by a dark halo, a pattern suggesting that material on the lunar surface had recently been disturbed.
"I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was," said Wagner, an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines who works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) system.
When Wagner compared older and newer images of the same region, he realized the feature was a newly formed impact crater. Scientists reported on September 16 in Science Advances that it is the largest newly formed crater ever identified in the solar system.
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