There’s A Big New Crater On The Moon

The Moon got whacked. The Moon gets whacked a lot, honestly. You can just look at its beaten, cratered surface to see that. But these days we're pretty good at counting its scars. Since 2010, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the Moon and constantly imaging its surface, and both computers and humans check those images closely to see if there have been any new kablammos since the last photograph. There often are. The LRO can spot craters as small as 30 feet across, caused by space rocks roughly the size of a monster truck tire. (NASA's comparison, not mine! And honestly a helpful one.) Those happen about 140 times a year. While you wouldn't want to be under one when it impacted, those smaller collisions are basically lunar weather. But every once in a while, something big comes in. Something big enough to get its own name. Say hello to McGetchin, the Moon's newest crater. It's large, and it's fresh—having been born at some point between April 11 and May 22, 2024, the two nearest passes of the LRO. A small bright spot that hadn't been there in the previous photo, according to McGetchin's discoverer, Robert Wagner. “It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” Wagner said. The bright patch was typical of previously buried regolith, lunar rock and dust scattered by the impact. Wagner discovered the new crater in images taken by the LRO's wide-angle camera, which captures more of the surface at a time. After that it was time to point the spacecraft's narrow-angle camera at McGetchin to make out more detail, and McGetchin looks pretty rad in close-up. The before and after of the same spot on the Moon's surface:

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