Look at the Moon on a clear night and it may seem like a perfectly still world.
But beneath that familiar gray surface, the Moon is constantly being reshaped by impacts from space.
And scientists have recently been given an unusually valuable opportunity to study that process.
A newly identified lunar crater, named McGetchin, was created sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, when an object estimated to be roughly 10–20 meters across struck the Moon. The resulting crater is about 728 feet (222 meters) wide and 141 feet (43 meters) deep—roughly the length of two football fields.
What makes this discovery especially interesting isn’t simply the size of the crater.
It’s what the impact exposed and changed beneath the surface.
🌕 The Moon Doesn’t Have an Atmosphere to Protect It
On Earth, our atmosphere burns up many incoming space rocks before they reach the ground.
The Moon has no substantial atmosphere.
That means meteoroids, asteroids and other objects can slam directly into its surface at enormous speeds.
Every impact can excavate lunar soil and rock, creating a crater and throwing material outward.
Over billions of years, this constant bombardment has transformed the lunar landscape.
But there’s a scientific advantage hidden inside all those collisions:
An impact can act like a natural excavation machine.
Instead of drilling into the Moon from the surface, scientists can study material that has been blasted upward from below.
Research on the Moon’s shallow subsurface notes that impact craters can serve as natural probes of underground layers because impacts excavate and disturb material beneath the surface.
🔍 A Fresh Crater Is Like Opening a Brand-New Window
Imagine looking at a freshly dug construction site.
Before the excavation, you can only see the ground surface.
Afterward, different layers of soil become visible.
Something similar happens when an impact occurs on the Moon—but on a much more dramatic scale.
A powerful collision can throw material from below the surface outward around the crater.
That means scientists can examine freshly excavated lunar material that hasn’t been exposed to the harsh lunar environment for as long as the older surface.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been particularly useful for this.
The spacecraft has been orbiting the Moon for more than 17 years, mapping its surface and detecting changes. NASA says LRO scientists have identified at least 1,000 new impact craters during the mission, along with roughly 100,000 other surface changes associated with impacts and their debris.
🛰️ Scientists Can Compare the Moon Before and After an Impact
Here’s one of the coolest parts.
Scientists don’t just look at a crater after it appears.
They can compare old images of the exact same location with newer ones.
That turns the Moon into something resembling a giant before-and-after experiment.
The McGetchin crater was discovered by comparing LRO observations from different periods. Scientists could see changes in the lunar surface that had occurred between earlier and later observations.
This allows researchers to ask questions such as:
- How large was the original impact?
- How much material was thrown out?
- How far did the disturbance extend?
- What happened to the surrounding soil?
- How did the impact change the surface’s thermal properties?
- What can the excavated material tell us about underground layers?
And sometimes, the answers are hiding far beyond the crater itself.
❄️ The Impact Created a Huge “Cold Spot”
The McGetchin crater produced another surprise.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter used its thermal instrument, Diviner, to examine the region around the crater.
Scientists found that an area roughly 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) wide around the crater was about 16°F (9°C) cooler at night than the surrounding terrain.
Why?
The impact disturbed and “fluffed up” the lunar regolith—the loose layer of dust, soil and broken rock covering the Moon.
That disturbed material became less dense and therefore less effective at retaining heat.
So the impact didn’t simply leave a hole.
It changed the physical properties of a much larger area around that hole.
That’s an important clue for scientists trying to understand how impacts reshape the Moon over time.
🧱 The Moon’s Surface Is More Complicated Than It Looks
The gray dust we see from Earth may look like a simple layer.
It isn’t.
The Moon’s shallow subsurface contains material that has been repeatedly affected by:
- Ancient asteroid impacts
- Volcanic activity
- Space weathering
- Radiation
- Micrometeorite bombardment
- Repeated mixing and crushing
Every new impact adds another chapter to that complicated geological story.
And because the Moon has no wind, rain or flowing water like Earth, many of these features can remain preserved for extraordinarily long periods.
That makes the Moon an incredible geological archive.
💥 How Often Does Something This Big Hit the Moon?
The McGetchin impact was unusual.
NASA scientists estimate that an impact capable of producing a crater of this size may happen on the Moon only about once every century or longer.
Smaller impacts, however, are much more common.
NASA estimates that impacts capable of producing craters around 30 feet (9 meters) across may create roughly 140 new craters across the Moon each year, although many smaller impacts are too tiny to identify from orbital imagery.
So while the Moon appears unchanged from night to night, its surface is actually being continuously modified.
🚀 And Scientists Recently Watched Another Impact Happen
The Moon isn’t only being hit by natural space rocks.
On August 5, 2026, a Falcon 9 upper stage struck the lunar surface after its earlier mission to deliver Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter subsequently photographed the newly formed crater.
Those images showed different materials around the crater, including older weathered surface material and brighter material excavated from deeper below the surface.
This gave scientists another valuable real-world example of what happens when an object collides with the Moon.
👀 The Moon Is Basically Running Its Own Experiments
Here’s the fascinating part:
Scientists don’t have to create every experiment themselves.
Sometimes the universe does it for them.
An asteroid arrives.
It hits the surface.
A crater forms.
Material from below gets thrown outward.
Satellites observe the result.
Scientists compare the new landscape with older images.
And suddenly, an event that happened millions of kilometers away becomes a natural laboratory.
Even flashes from smaller lunar impacts can be studied. During Artemis II’s lunar mission in April 2026, astronauts observed flashes caused by meteoroids striking the lunar surface, while observers on Earth also contributed videos through NASA-supported citizen-science efforts.
🌑 Why Does Understanding the Moon’s Underground Matter?
This isn’t simply about understanding craters.
The shallow subsurface is important for understanding how the Moon formed, evolved and changed over billions of years.
It can also matter for future exploration.
As humans and robotic missions spend more time on the Moon, scientists need to understand what the surface is made of, how stable it is and how impacts have modified it.
The lunar subsurface may also contain resources and geological information that future explorers could study or potentially use.
Understanding the Moon’s surface layers today could therefore help answer questions about both lunar history and future exploration.
🤔 What If the Moon Had No New Craters?
Imagine a strange version of the Moon where impacts suddenly stopped.
Over enormous periods of time, its surface would gradually become a record of past events rather than an actively changing landscape.
But that’s not the Moon we have.
Every new impact adds another mark.
Some are tiny.
Some are enormous.
And occasionally, one is large enough to give scientists a rare opportunity to study freshly disturbed material and observe how an impact changes the surrounding landscape.
🌌 The Next Impact Could Reveal Something We Don’t Expect
That’s perhaps the most exciting part.
Scientists know impacts are going to happen.
What they don’t always know is exactly what the next one will reveal.
A future collision could expose a previously unknown geological layer.
It could disturb unusual rocks.
It could help refine estimates of how frequently impacts occur.
Or it could reveal that an impact affects the lunar surface in ways scientists hadn’t fully appreciated.
The Moon has been keeping its geological history hidden beneath layers of dust and rock for billions of years.
Sometimes, all it takes is an asteroid traveling through space at incredible speed to open the next page.
🌕 What Do You Think?
If scientists could safely send a robotic drilling mission anywhere on the Moon, what would you want it to investigate?
A) Ancient rocks
B) Underground caves
C) Water ice
D) The layers beneath a fresh crater
The Moon may look quiet from Earth.
But up close, it’s a world that’s still changing.
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