'We only expect to encounter that once every 130 years': A huge new crater on the moon could mean a giant leap for lunar science, veteran researcher says

Scientists using NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have discovered McGetchin crater, a giant new impact structure measuring more than 700 feet wide. LRO investigator Julie Stopar explains what the discovery could mean for humanity's future on the moon.

By Brandon Specktor Edited by Laura Mondragón, Tia Ghose

Published 22 September 2026 In Interview

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A black and white image of a crater on a gray surface — An overhead view of McGetchin crater, taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on Dec. 5, 2025. The massive new structure measures about two football fields wide.

(Image credit: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter)

Since launching in 2009, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) — a robotic satellite about the size of a minivan — has taken more than 3 million photos of the lunar surface. This week, scientists studying a few hundred of those photos announced what they're calling a "once-in-a-century" discovery: the biggest, freshest impact crater ever seen in the solar system. ‪It's the result of a building-size meteorite that slammed into the moon just two years ago.

The new lunar pockmark, named McGetchin crater after the late geologist and lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, is about 728 feet (222 meters) wide, on average, and 141 feet (43 m) deep ‪—‬ imagine a hole as long as two American football fields and deep enough to fit a 14-story building inside.

"We know generally that there's more small things in space than there are large things, so that means we tend to get a lot of small craters on the moon and very few large craters," Julie Stopar, a senior scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and deputy principal investigator on the LRO's camera team, told Live Science. "So something the size of this crater, we only expect to encounter that once every 130 years, approximately."

McGetchin is nowhere near the moon's largest crater; that honor goes to the South Pole-Aitken basin, a gargantuan gouge about 10,000 times wider than the newly discovered crater. But McGetchin is the largest new crater. Appearing seemingly out of nowhere in images from spring 2024, it's the biggest one scientists have seen in the 17 years that LRO has been active. And now that it's known to the world, some intrepid skywatchers think they've spotted the crater's bright, white debris ring from Earth.

The other cool thing is that it impacted on the boundary between two different types of deposits on the moon. There's the volcanic mare deposits [dark patches visible from Earth] and there's the highlands, which are ancient crustal material. The highlands are brighter and tend to be hillier, more mountainous, whereas the mare are flat plains, and they're very dark. This impact seems to have occurred right on the boundary between those two areas, so that's reflected in the materials that are excavated by that crater.

JS: Yes, I've been looking at a bunch of craters, which I think look morphologically [their shape] and albedo-wise [how much light they reflect into space] very fresh. They have the bright ejecta [the material that gets blasted out from the meteor impact]; they have crisp rims. But I don't know how old they are, because they were there before the LRO. I think they're young, but I don't have any proof of age. So that was my first thought: "Oh my gosh; this makes me feel so much better if all these other craters I'm studying are still in really good condition like this one is."

And that's important, because people want to go to the surface for exploration, send landers, start building moon bases and so forth, and there's some concern that impactors will be a hazard. So it would be helpful to have a better idea of whether that's a really frequent concern or only a once-in-a-while concern. We can also study things like how the impact angle, the target materials, and the velocity and type of impactor play a role in forming craters.

JS: At this point, it's not too much of a concern to myself about human-made objects destroying natural habitats on the moon. Other spacecraft impacts, like the boosters from the Apollo program, made craters a long time ago. But I think, as there are more people and countries and even companies going to the moon, they'll have to get coordinated so as to not interfere with each other's activities — because that would be a problem. It's just a reminder like, "Hey, guys; you need to talk to each other and get coordinated and make sure you're keeping track of these impacts and your debris, and you're working together."

Otherwise, those craters are interesting because we know the impactor's mass and shape beforehand. It gives us a new insight into how craters form when you have irregularly shaped masses, like hollow cylinders and things like that. They'll also tell us about the moon's surface as well, because it's a different type of impact and it's got a different kind of energy to it and a different shape. So we do learn a lot about the cratering process in general from those.

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Brandon is the space / physics editor at Live Science. With more than 20 years of editorial experience, his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, CBS.com, the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and other outlets. He holds a bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona, with minors in journalism and media arts. His interests include black holes, asteroids and comets, and the search for extraterrestrial life.