In mid-2024, a comet or asteroid hit the moon at high speed. After the impact, a huge crater 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep was created on the moon. However, no telescope on Earth was able to capture the event at that moment. Even in the images of spacecraft orbiting the moon, no one noticed the incident.
A year and a half after that incident, a NASA Lunar Orbiter first realized the matter while comparing old and new images. Where there was no such crater before, a huge new crater was seen there. It was later named McGutchin Crater. The incident is not only important because of the huge size of the crater. Scientists currently estimate that such a large object can hit the moon after an average of about one hundred and thirty-two years.
More importantly, this is the largest new impact crater ever formed by scientists on any planet in the solar system. The new crater was created on the side of the moon that always faces Earth. Old and new NASA images show that there was no crater there. But the March 22 image shows the crater. No one has seen exactly what hit the moon's surface. An asteroid or comet fragment the size of a three- to six-story building hit the moon at great speed.
Even such a small rock traveling at high speed in space can create enormous energy upon impact. And that is why this huge crater, 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep, was created. The moon is about 384,000 kilometers from Earth. A crater is actually very small from such a distance. NASA's Lunar Orbiter regularly takes pictures of the moon. It is not easy to immediately spot a new crater several hundred feet across in images of such a large area.
On October 24, 2025, NASA's Robert Wagner saw an unusually bright area while comparing old and new images of the moon. Later, NASA took detailed pictures of the area with a more powerful narrow-angle camera. It was then that the size and depth of this new crater became clear. The moon does not have a thick atmosphere like Earth. So such small craters form regularly on the moon. But the occurrence of a 728-foot-wide crater is extremely rare.
A new crater this large on the moon can form on average once every 132 years. That is why McGutchin Crater is particularly important for scientists. Usually, such large craters have to be studied after millions of years. But NASA scientists now have images from both before and after the collision. As a result, it will be much easier to analyze how a large crater is formed and how the surface of the moon changes.
Signs of changes have been found in the lunar soil about 120 kilometers away from the impact site of this asteroid. Even the area around the crater, which is about seven kilometers wide, has become eight to nine degrees Celsius colder than before. If an asteroid similar to the one that hit the moon were to hit Earth, it would likely explode in the atmosphere. Since humans are going to establish settlements on the moon in the future, this event would also pose a risk to the permanent presence of humans on the moon in the future.