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# SOMETHING HIT THE MOON. HOW DID NOBODY SEE IT?
- URL: https://the-ff-express.ghost.io/something-hit-the-moon-how-did-nobody-see-it/
- Published: 2026-09-21T16:59:18.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-21T16:59:18.000Z
- Author: Cristina Marin

## **A building-sized object slammed into the lunar surface, excavated a crater wider than two football fields, and disturbed terrain for miles. We didn’t discover what happened until more than a year later.**

  
There is something unsettlingly wonderful about looking at the Moon and realizing that while we were down here going about our lives, something enormous happened up there. No warning. No telescope captured the collision as it happened. No astronomer sounded an alarm. No viral video showed a flash spreading across the lunar surface. 

Sometime between **April 11 and May 22, 2024**, a fragment of an asteroid or comet roughly the size of a **three- to six-story building** slammed into the Moon’s near side. The collision blasted open a crater approximately **728 feet — 222 meters — across**. At its deepest, the crater reaches roughly **141 feet — 43 meters — down.**

And despite the scale of the event, telescopes on Earth and in space apparently missed the impact when it happened. We found the scar afterward. More than a year afterward. And that may be the most interesting part of the entire story.   
  
**THE MOON HAD CHANGED.**  
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter(**LRO**) has been circling the Moon since 2009\. Its cameras have spent years photographing the lunar surface. Again. And again. And again. That means scientists possess something extraordinarily valuable: Before pictures.   
  
In October 2025, image-processing specialist **Robert Wagner**, working with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera system, was performing what NASA describes as a routine data-quality check. He was looking at a large map of the Moon when something caught his attention. A bright area. Around it, a dark halo.   
  
The pattern suggested that lunar material had been disturbed. So Wagner stopped what he was doing and started investigating. When he compared newer images with older photographs of the same location, there was no ambiguity. There was now a crater where previously there had been none. The Moon had acquired a new scar. And scientists had photographs from both sides of the event.   
  
**MEET McGETCHIN CRATER.**   
Researchers named the new feature **McGetchin crater**, honoring the late lunar scientist Thomas McGetchin, a former director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. It is enormous by the standards of impacts scientists have actually watched appear during the modern era. At approximately **728 feet across**, McGetchin is about three times larger than the previous record-holder discovered using LRO observations.   
  
Researchers describe an impact of this scale as statistically rare—roughly a **once-every-132-years** event based on their estimates. NASA calls it the largest newly formed crater yet identified in the solar system through this kind of modern before-and-after observation. Which immediately raises the obvious question. **How the hell did nobody see it happen?** 
  
**BECAUSE SPACE IS REALLY FUCKING BIG.**  
The Moon looks enormous from Earth. But monitoring every square mile of its surface continuously is another matter entirely. The impactor wasn’t a planet-killing asteroid.   
  
Researchers estimate it was somewhere around the size of a three-to six-story building. That’s large when it is sitting next to you. It is extraordinarily small against the scale of space. And detecting an impact requires more than simply having telescopes pointed vaguely toward the Moon. Someone—or some instrument—has to be watching the correct patch of lunar surface at approximately the correct moment, under conditions where the event can actually be detected.   
  
This one slipped through. Even more interestingly, **LRO actually photographed the changed surface in 2024.** The data existed. The significance of what was inside that data simply wasn’t recognized until 2025\. That’s an important distinction. NASA didn’t suddenly photograph the crater for the first time a year later. Scientists went back through imagery and realized: **Wait. That wasn’t there before.** 
  
**AND THE CRATER WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING.**  
When something hits the Moon at tremendous speed, it doesn’t politely excavate a circular hole and stop. Energy moves outward. Rock fractures. Dust and debris fly. The lunar soil—called **regolith**—gets churned, displaced and rearranged.   
  
Researchers found that the McGetchin impact disturbed the lunar surface across an area extending more than **66 miles — 100 kilometers** from the crater. That number deserves a moment. The crater itself is 728 feet across. But measurable effects of the impact reached tens of miles beyond it.   
  
Researchers studying modern lunar impacts have found that material thrown outward can alter the uppermost regolith at distances exceeding **1,000 crater diameters** in some cases. A relatively small object can therefore alter an astonishingly large area of the lunar surface. And McGetchin produced another surprise. 

**IT MADE PART OF THE MOON COLDER.**   
Scientists identified a thermal anomaly surrounding the new crater. A **cold spot roughly four miles — seven kilometers — wide.** Not because the impact delivered something frozen. The explanation appears to involve what happened to the soil. The collision loosened and churned the upper lunar regolith, changing its physical structure and therefore the way the surface stores and releases heat.   
  
Researcher David Paige of UCLA compared the process to **gardening the regolith**—continually turning material over and exposing what had previously been underneath.   
  
That sounds almost gentle. The mechanism isn’t. A cosmic projectile just violently rearranged several miles of lunar soil. But scientifically, that churn is enormously useful. Because it gives researchers a natural experiment. They can now watch what freshly disturbed lunar terrain does after an impact.

**THE MOON ISN’T DEAD.**  
This may be my favorite part. We tend to think of the Moon as finished. Static. Ancient. A giant gray museum hanging above us with footprints from 1969 still sitting exactly where astronauts left them. And compared with Earth, the lunar surface does change very slowly. There are no oceans washing coastlines away. No rain. No rivers. No forests growing through abandoned ground. No terrestrial-style weather constantly grinding the landscape down.   
  
That is one reason the Moon preserves an extraordinary record of impacts that Earth has largely erased through erosion and plate tectonics. But **unchanging** isn’t the same thing as **slowly changing**. The Moon is still being hit. Its soil is still being churned. Micrometeorites are still striking it. Solar radiation and charged particles are still interacting with its surface.   
  
And new research using years of LRO imagery shows that freshly disturbed lunar soil can continue changing measurably in the decades after an impact. The Moon isn’t frozen in time. Its clock just runs differently from ours.   
  
**LET’S LOOK DEEPER.**  
Here’s where McGetchin stops being merely a cool space story. Humans intend to spend more time on the Moon. That means impacts stop being only geological curiosities. They become an **engineering problem**. Habitats. Solar panels. Communication equipment. Rovers. Scientific instruments. Power systems. Landing infrastructure. Anything humans put on the lunar surface will be sitting on terrain that is still exposed to cosmic impacts.   
  
A direct strike from an object capable of producing McGetchin would obviously be catastrophic to nearby infrastructure. But researchers are also interested in something subtler: **What happens farther away?** McGetchin threw material across tremendous distances and altered terrain far beyond the crater itself.   
  
Understanding those secondary effects matters when deciding how far apart lunar facilities should be, how equipment should be protected, and what kinds of impact hazards future crews may face. NASA explicitly notes that studying events like this becomes increasingly valuable as lunar scientific and commercial activity expands. Suddenly a crater isn’t merely a crater. It’s data for designing the future.   
  
**BUT WAS EARTH IN DANGER?**  
There is currently no evidence that this particular object represented a known threat to Earth before striking the Moon. And we should be careful here. The fact that an impactor hit the Moon without being observed in real time does not mean a giant Earth-killing asteroid secretly slipped through planetary-defense systems.   
  
Those are very different claims. The McGetchin impactor was estimated to be roughly building-sized.   
  
Objects of different sizes, trajectories and brightness present very different detection challenges. So the lesson isn’t: **NASA can’t see asteroids coming**. The evidence doesn’t establish that. The more accurate lesson is considerably more interesting: **Our immediate cosmic neighborhood contains far more moving material than humans continuously observe.** Sometimes we discover what happened by examining the evidence afterward. Which is precisely what happened here.  
  
**THERE’S ANOTHER LITTLE TWIST.**   
In August 2026—just weeks before NASA announced the McGetchin research, LRO photographed another fresh crater, and scientists knew exactly what made that one. **A SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage** had struck the Moon on August 5\. NASA deliberately maneuvered LRO so its cameras could photograph the **new impact site** afterward. Two new scars. Two completely different stories.   
  
**One impact** was predicted. We knew what hit. We knew when. We knew where to look. **The other** happened naturally in 2024\. Nobody caught it in real time. Its crater sat quietly in the imagery until somebody noticed something that didn’t belong. Which makes McGetchin such a beautiful demonstration of how science often actually works. Not: **EUREKA**! Sometimes it’s: **Wait a fucking minute.** 
  
**WHAT WE KNOW**  
Something struck the Moon’s near side between **April 11 and May 22, 2024.**   
  
Researchers estimate the object was a fragment of an asteroid or comet approximately the size of a **three- to six-story building**. The impact created McGetchin crater, approximately **728 feet wide** and as much as **141 feet deep.**   
  
The collision was not detected in real time. LRO imagery later revealed the change, and Robert Wagner noticed the unusual disturbance during a data review in 2025\.   
  
Researchers estimate an event of this magnitude occurs approximately once every **132 years**. The impact disturbed lunar terrain far beyond the crater and produced a cold region roughly four **miles across.**   
  
**WHAT WE STILL DON’T FUCKING KNOW**  
Because the collision wasn’t detected when it occurred, some properties of the impactor must be reconstructed from what it left behind. And sure as fuck, scientists cannot rewind 2024 and watch the object approach.   
  
Researchers can model its likely size, impact energy and physical effects. But reconstruction is not the same thing as having observed the object itself. We don’t have a photograph of the projectile sailing toward the Moon. We don’t have a beautiful telescope sequence showing the collision.   
  
What we have is something arguably more interesting: **the forensic evidence.** A surface before. A surface afterward. A 728-foot hole between them. And physics.  
  
**THE RECEIPTS.**   
**FFE**: NASA published its account of the discovery on September 16, 2026\. The McGetchin findings were reported in two papers published in Science Advances, examining the newly discovered crater and the extensive thermal disturbance surrounding it. [NASA’s Moon Orbiter Spots New, ‘Once-in-Century’ Moon Crater](https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/moon/nasas-moon-orbiter-spots-new-once-in-century-moon-crater/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com)  
**FFE**: Independent coverage from the Associated Press reported the crater dimensions, impact window, estimated impactor size and lack of real-time detection. [NASA spacecraft discovers a huge new crater on the moon](https://apnews.com/article/moon-lunar-crater-space-nasa-80eea242ad275fda1f7a88587cdccd2f?ref=the-ff-express.ghost.io)  
**FFE**: Separate 2026 research using LRO observations documents how modern impacts disturb lunar regolith across extraordinary distances and how those disturbed surfaces continue evolving afterward. [Regolith in Motion: Dynamic Surface Evolution After Lunar Impacts](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2026GL123977?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com)  
**FFE**: NASA — Once-in-a-Century Moon Crater. Science Advances / lunar surface research**.** [New lunar crater reveals extensive distal regolith modification](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeh9568?ref=the-ff-express.ghost.io), and [A new 222-m diameter lunar crater](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeh7812?ref=the-ff-express.ghost.io)

**DON’T TAKE OUR FUCKING WORD FOR IT.** 
**READ THE RECEIPTS.**  
Because while everyone was looking up at the Moon in 2024— something hit it. Hard.   
  
The evidence was photographed. The data came home. And for more than a year, buried among an enormous stream of lunar imagery, the Moon apparently sat there with a brand-new 728-foot hole in it waiting for somebody to say: **Hold the fuck on. Was that there before?**  
  
Same facts. Different perspectives. Let’s look deeper. 🌕💥