NASA's LRO finds largest new lunar crater, McGetchin, formed in 2024

September 19, 2026 at 05:00 PM2 min

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NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter identified a 222-meter-wide crater on the Moon's near side that formed between April 11 and May 22, 2024. The crater, named McGetchin, is the largest newly formed impact crater found anywhere in the solar system. The discovery was published in Science Advances on September 16, 2026.

Key Facts

The crater measures 222 meters in diameter and is located at 1.3536°N, 67.1765°E on the Moon's eastern near side.
The impact occurred between April 11 and May 22, 2024, with an estimated energy of 6.5 × 10^10 kilojoules.
The crater is named McGetchin after lunar scientist Tom McGetchin.
Two papers describing the crater were published in Science Advances on September 16, 2026.

Discovery and Naming

Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines working with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera system, noticed the bright spot inside a dark halo while running a routine quality check on October 24, 2025. The spot spanned hundreds of pixels on a camera whose pixels are roughly the size of an American football field. The crater is named McGetchin after lunar scientist Tom McGetchin. Two papers describing the crater were published in Science Advances on September 16, 2026.

Impact Site Characteristics

The crater sits just inside the outer ring of the Crisium basin, 330 kilometers from the edge of Mare Crisium. The site had a complicated boundary between dark mare basalt and paler highland material, with lava from an ancient eruptive center 23 kilometers to the east-southeast. The new crater is slightly lopsided, with a rim 231 meters across at its widest on a north-northeast line and 213 meters at its narrowest east-southeast. Within the crater's footprint, the largest pre-existing pit was 40 meters across, and none of those older craters survive.

Impact Timing and Energy

The impact happened inside a 41-day window bracketed by before-and-after images, between April 11 and May 22, 2024. The paper estimates the event's energy at 6.5 × 10^10 kilojoules, assuming an impactor density of 3 grams per cubic centimeter and an impact speed of 15 kilometers per second. The impactor was a comet or asteroid fragment.