Astronomy Picture of the Day - A New Lunar Crater: McGetchin

NASA ^ | 23 Sep, 2026 | Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Intuitive Machines Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST I

[MtnClimber]

Explanation: A once-in-a-lifetime crater has appeared on the Moon! A comet or asteroid roughly the size of a humpback whale (approximately 10-20 meters, 30-60 feet) crashed into the Moon sometime between April and May of 2024. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), with its monthly monitoring of the Moon, captured today’s images of the lunar surface before and after the event. The resulting crater, named after Apollo-era lunar scientist McGetchin, is two soccer fields across. Craters of this size are only expected once every 132 years! Follow up thermal imaging revealed a large cold spot that surrounds the warm crater. Surface impacts will puff up the loose lunar sediment, or regolith, making it less dense and harder to retain heat. This event affected an area much larger than the visible crater, which will inform humanity’s understanding of surface impacts and the evolution of the Moon’s surface. It also reminds us all to be thankful for Earth's atmosphere.

[MtnClimber]

To be added or removed from the Astronomy Picture of the Day ping list please send me a request via "Private Reply" (Mail).

For more detail go to the link and click on the image for a high definition image. You can then move the magnifying glass cursor then click to zoom in and click again to zoom out. When zoomed in you can scan by moving the side bars on the bottom and right side of the image.

[MtnClimber]

BEFORE

[MtnClimber]

AFTER

[MtnClimber]

Pinging the APOD list

🪐 🌟 🌌 🍔

[misterdarcey]

Did it say “Oh no, not again...” just before impact?

[No name given]

Wow.

[No name given]

Whoa.

[Quality_Not_Quantity]

Craters of this size are only expected once every 132 years!

I love how NASA feels it is so necessary to emphasize facts! That's really cool that they do that! I wouldn't have known that statistics could be so very exciting!

[Verginius Rufus]

Once every 132 years? So where is the 1894 crater?

The moon is America's so it should be "two football fields across."

[Red Badger]

Good thing it didn’t hit Uranus!..................

[MtnClimber]

Moon Station Zero has been blown up by a Chinese-trained whale.

[Nateman]

Be glad it hit the Moon and not Earth! That would have ruined many a person’s day if it had hit here. (The ocean wave from such a hit would have been devastating!)

[Stosh]

” . . .roughly the size of a humpback whale (approximately 10-20 meters, 30-60 feet) crashed into the Moon”

Paging Ford Prefect!

[17th Miss Regt]

The eye of Sauron!

[Deaf and Discerning]

This reminds me of the meteor that smacked into our planet and created the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago...

Chicxulub Crater

[telescope115]

Pretty cool!

[Blogatron]

That's what the bowl of petunias next to the whale was thinking.

"Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.” - Douglas Adams

[misterdarcey]

I stand corrected...