Last week, NASA announced that in October 2025, it spotted a huge new crater on the surface of the Moon.
Measuring about 728 feet (222 meters) across and roughly 141 feet (43 meters) deep, according to NASA, the lunar impact site, officially called McGetchin crater, was a “once in a century” event.
However, McGetchin crater wasn’t discovered by a spacecraft actively watching the impact happen, but by comparing hundreds of photographs taken over almost 15 years on two different camera systems.
The initial discovery of the new impact site – which was thought to have appeared sometime between April and May 2024 – was made by NASA image processing specialist Robert Wagner.
He'd been comparing hundreds of Wide-Angle Camera (WAC) frames snapped from aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
The LRO, a remotely controlled spacecraft, orbits the Moon from a distance of some 35 miles above, carrying a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), which itself houses the WAC.
Designed to capture vast swaths of the lunar expanse, its native single-frame resolution is just 0.01 MP, but each pixel can resolve roughly 100 meters, making it the perfect tool for spotting geographical changes across a broad lunar area.
Wagner was using software to compare WAC images of the lunar surface taken in 2011 and 2025, when he saw the fresh impact zone, which he told NASA science writers showed up as an “unusually” large, bright spot circled by a dark halo.
With the new crater discovered, a team of NASA imaging specialists then honed in on it with the LROC’s two Narrow-Angle Cameras (NACs).
According to NASA, each NAC has a 700 mm-equivalent effective focal length and a 5-km-wide imaging swath from a 50-km altitude, and can resolve details at roughly 0.5 m per pixel.
Unlike the WAC, this enabled the scientists to measure the crater, study its shape, and examine the ejecta surrounding it.
The NAC images also helped the researchers to estimate the size and force of the rock fragment that formed McGetchin crater.
The initial thought is that the fragment was potentially the size of a three- to six-story building and may have broken away from a larger asteroid, but more details are expected in a future paper.
For close to two decades, the LRO has been analyzing the Moon, with operators using its array of instruments to map the lunar topography and environment, in this time identifying some 1,000 new impact craters.
Ironically, this LROC mission demonstrates something familiar to photographers on Earth: sometimes one camera or lens, for that matter, just isn’t enough, to get the job done.
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