LRO found McGetchin crater, 728 feet across, a once-in-a-century lunar hit
NASA Science said Robert Wagner identified a 728-foot, 141-foot-deep crater named McGetchin, formed between 11 April and 22 May 2024. CBS News said the hole is bigger than the Roman Colosseum and that two Science Advances papers report it.
Science··Midday
Wagner was doing a data-quality check
NASA Science said it started as a routine data-quality check, until Robert Wagner, a scientist with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, spotted what the agency calls the largest newly formed crater found in the solar system during LRO's work. Officially named McGetchin after lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon's eastern edge sometime between 11 April and 22 May 2024 after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit. CBS News, crediting CBS/AP, said LRO spotted the crater on the near side in that same April-May 2024 window.[1], [2]
728 feet by 141 feet
NASA Science put the width at 728 feet, the length of two football fields, and the depth at 141 feet, enough to fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses. CBS News repeated those NASA figures and added that the hole is bigger than the Roman Colosseum. CBS said such a large-scale event is estimated to occur only once every 132 years; NASA Science said scientists estimate an impact of this magnitude about once a century. Those two recurrence lines are being kept separate.[1], [2]
The papers are dated mid-September
NASA Science said a pair of papers in Science Advances reported the find. CBS News quoted scientists writing that the event is a statistically rare, effectively once-in-a-lifetime observation, in one of two studies appearing Wednesday in Science Advances. CBS said wide-angle images were not identified in the data crush until August 2025, that LRO gathered more detailed pictures last fall, and that the crater is three times bigger than the previous record-holder found by LRO a decade ago. The strike escaped real-time detection by telescopes on Earth and in space, CBS reported.[2], [1]
