NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team has identified a new lunar crater 222 meters across, about twice the length of an American football field.
The finding appears in Science Advances. Lead author Mark Robinson of Intuitive Machines, the LRO camera principal investigator, wrote the paper with Julie Stopar of the Universities Space Research Association’s Lunar and Planetary Institute and other team members.
Scientists date the impact between April 11 and May 22, 2024. That makes it the largest crater formed and found while LRO has been at the Moon. Impacts of this size are estimated to occur roughly once every 130 years, about once in a lifetime.
The International Astronomical Union named the feature McGetchin crater after Thomas McGetchin, a volcanologist and lunar scientist who directed the Lunar and Planetary Institute, then the Lunar Science Institute, beginning in 1977. His 1973 work with colleagues on impact ejecta is still used to interpret debris around craters and basins.
The new hole sits on a boundary between rugged highlands and a flat mare. Average depth is about 43 meters. A bright ejecta blanket of rock and dust stretches hundreds of meters from the rim. Because the scar is fresh, researchers said it shows the immediate results of an impact before later meteorites and space weathering wear it down.
Paper authors are Mark S. Robinson, Aaron K. Boyd, Prasun Mahanti, Madeleine R. Manheim, Emerson J. Speyerer, Julie D. Stopar and Robert V. Wagner. The IAU listing is at https://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Feature/16447.