Moon crater found two years later offers rare warning for NASA lunar base

Scientists have identified a giant new lunar crater created by an unnoticed impact about two years ago. The rare strike is sharpening concerns about debris risks as NASA plans a long-term moon base.

In Short

• Lunar orbiter first imaged the impact site in May 2024
• Scientists confirmed ejecta spread across over 100 km of lunar terrain
• A seven-km cold spot suggests freshly loosened soil around the crater

Scientists have identified a large new crater on the moon, created by a powerful impact about two years ago that went unnoticed at the time. The steep-sided crater is about 728 feet across and up to 141 feet deep, making it the biggest known recent impact crater in the solar system.

Researchers said an event of this scale is expected only once every 132 years, making the discovery important as NASA prepares to build a base for astronauts on the moon. “This event constitutes a statistically rare, effectively once-in-a-lifetime observation,” the scientists wrote in one of two studies published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted the crater on the moon’s near side in May 2024, soon after it was formed by an incoming fragment of an asteroid or comet. But the strike was not detected in real time by telescopes on Earth or in space. The orbiter’s wide-angle images were not identified amid the large volume of data until August 2025. The spacecraft then collected more detailed images last autumn, with the discovery confirmed earlier this year.

The crater has been named after the late Thomas McGetchin, a former director of Houston’s Lunar and Planetary Institute. It is three times bigger than the previous record-holder found by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter a decade ago. The moon, marked by impacts since ancient times, also has some of the solar system’s largest craters, including one that stretches more than 2,400 km across.

According to Mark Robinson, chief scientist for the orbiter’s cameras at Intuitive Machines and lead author of one of the studies, the latest impact disturbed the lunar surface for more than 100 km. Dust and rocky soil were thrown out at a higher angle than expected. A separate study found a 7-km-wide cold spot around the new crater, which matches the loosening of the moon’s top soil. Co-author David Paige of the University of California, Los Angeles, compared it to gardening. “We’re now thinking of impacts as a way to garden the regolith - churning the sediments and putting stuff above that’s usually below the surface,” Paige said in a statement.

Robinson said the many crater discoveries made by the orbiter since its 2009 launch show that the moon’s top inch, or 2 cm, of soil is being overturned by ejected material every 80,000 years, faster than earlier estimates. This also challenges the idea that the Apollo astronauts’ dusty footprints will remain forever. They will “definitely be long gone in that time frame,” Robinson said in an email.

The next step, Robinson said, is to work out the risk of material thrown out by such impacts striking NASA’s planned moon base. “That information will help engineers harden structures so one won’t have to worry about damage, or maybe worry less.” Overall, the newly identified crater has given scientists a rare chance to study a recent large lunar impact and its possible implications for future human activity on the moon.

With PTI Inputs

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