NASA Spots New Crater on the Moon the Size of Two Football Fields
The crater measures 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep, and NASA says it is the largest newly formed impact crater found in the solar system.
- On Wednesday, Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines, discovered the largest newly formed crater in the solar system while reviewing lunar photos; the crater is officially named McGetchin.
- Formed between April 11 and May 22, 2024, the crater resulted from a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-storey building that Wagner identified by comparing before-and-after lunar images.
- Measuring 728 feet wide—the length of two football fields—and 141 feet deep, the crater on the Moon is 43 metres deep, enough to fit three vertically stacked school buses.
- Thermal analysis by the orbiter's Diviner instrument revealed a cold spot seven kilometres across where the surface cools 8 to 9 kelvin further through the lunar night, with a measured peak anomaly of 8.61 kelvin.
- Crater production models predict an impact of this size on the Moon about once every 132 years; cold spots fade over 100,000 to two million years, making McGetchin a pristine example of such features.
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26 Articles
It was an accidental discovery, but also a reminder that even after almost two decades of observing the Moon, Lunar Recognition Orbiter still manages to reveal recent events in a world that is far from geologically immobile.
A routine quality check on a Moon map turned up a bright spot ringed by a dark halo, and it marked a 222-metre crater that did not exist before spring 2024, the largest newly formed crater yet found anywhere in the solar system
Robert Wagner was checking image quality on a global map of the Moon when the halo appeared. The crater it marks, now named McGetchin, is 222 metres across and 43 metres deep, and a zone of ground seven kilometres across now runs 8 to 9 kelvin colder at night than the ground beyond it.
NASA has identified the largest new impact crater on the lunar surface in the last century. The giant structure, named McGetchin Crater, has been confirmed to have been formed by an asteroid or comet fragment impact in the spring of 2024. Measuring 222 meters wide and 43 meters deep, this crater is located near Italy...
NASA scientists found a newly formed crater on the Moon, larger than the Roman Colosseum
The crater was named McGetchin in honor of lunar scientist Tom McGetchin.
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