more than 3 million photos of the lunar surface. This week, scientists studying a few hundred of those photos announced what they're calling a "once-in-a-century" discovery: the biggest, freshest impact crater ever seen in the solar system. ‪It's the result of a building-size meteorite that slammed into the moon just two years ago.

The new lunar pockmark, named McGetchin crater after the late geologist and lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, is about 728 feet (222 meters) wide, on average, and 141 feet (43 m) deep ‪—‬ imagine a hole as long as two American football fields and deep enough to fit a 14-story building inside.

"We know generally that there's more small things in space than there are large things, so that means we tend to get a lot of small craters on the moon and very few large craters," Julie Stopar, a senior scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and deputy principal investigator on the LRO's camera team, told Live Science. "So something the size of this crater, we only expect to encounter that once every 130 years, approximately."

McGetchin is nowhere near the moon's largest crater; that honor goes to the South Pole-Aitken basin, a gargantuan gouge about 10,000 times wider than the newly discovered crater. But McGetchin is the largest new crater. Appearing seemingly out of nowhere in images from spring 2024, it's the biggest one scientists have seen in the 17 years that LRO has been active. And now that it's known to the world, some intrepid skywatchers think they've spotted the crater's bright, white debris ring from Earth.

The team described their findings in two papers published Sept. 16 in the journal Science Advances. Live Science spoke with Stopar to find out what this fresh crater can teach us about lunar geology, impact rates and potential risks to the future human visitors to the moon.

Brandon Specktor: The moon is riddled with craters. What's so interesting about this new one?

Julie Stopar: On one hand, it's a nice crater because it's so fresh and new. It hasn't been weathered. On Earth, we see the remnants of impact craters, but a lot of the original details are lost through weathering and degradation and time. But the moon preserves all of that much better.

This crater, in particular, is so fresh and young — it's only about 2.5 years old. It's in really, really good condition. We can study it to understand how impact cratering occurs and all the processes that go along with it.

The other cool thing is that it impacted on the boundary between two different types of deposits on the moon. There's the volcanic mare deposits [dark patches visible from Earth] and there's the highlands, which are ancient crustal material. The highlands are brighter and tend to be hillier, more mountainous, whereas the mare are flat plains, and they're very dark. This impact seems to have occurred right on the boundary between those two areas, so that's reflected in the materials that are excavated by that crater.

BS: The meteorite that made this crater was the size of a three-to-six-story building, according to your team's estimates. Could we have seen this impact from Earth?

JS: Yes. This is a relatively large impact, and from Earth, we have observed flashes associated with smaller impacts. So I think it's possible, under good conditions, that this may have made a flash. We don't know if anyone was watching, though — so if somebody out there has videos that they can dig through, they could go back and look for it.

BS: This impact happened in April or May 2024. One of your colleagues discovered the crater in LRO data in October 2025. Why did it take so long?

JS: LRO orbits the moon about 12 times each day. While we're going around, we can only image a really small portion of the moon on each pass. So you can imagine it takes many, many orbits to go around the moon and to reimage each part of the surface. When we don't have an impact flash to help us decide where to look for these craters, it's basically a random search.

Over time, we eventually will get repeat imaging [of the same area], but it takes years to get that. On top of that, the processing that it takes to make the before and after images

takes a lot of work; basically, you're looking through all the images that have been taken of the moon under the right conditions, and it just takes a lot of time and effort to process that.

BS: Your colleague, Robert Wagner, says he "stopped and dropped everything" when he discovered the crater in LRO's data. What was your reaction when he first showed it to you?

JS: I was surprised that it was so large! But I've seen a lot of similar craters on the moon, so my actual first thought was, "Oh my gosh; this crater might actually help me constrain how old all of these other craters are!"

BS: So because you know this crater is so fresh, it's helping you date other craters you've seen too?

JS: Yes, I've been looking at a bunch of craters, which I think look morphologically [their shape] and albedo-wise [how much light they reflect into space] very fresh. They have the bright ejecta [the material that gets blasted out from the meteor impact]; they have crisp rims. But I don't know how old they are, because they were there before the LRO. I think they're young, but I don't have any proof of age. So that was my first thought: "Oh my gosh; this makes me feel so much better if all these other craters I'm studying are still in really good condition like this one is."

BS: What, specifically, do you hope to learn about the moon from this crater?

JS: There's hope that we can use this to help understand the current impact cratering rate. How much and how often do different sizes of debris in the solar system impact the moon?

And that's important, because people want to go to the surface for exploration, send landers, start building moon bases and so forth, and there's some concern that impactors will be a hazard. So it would be helpful to have a better idea of whether that's a really frequent concern or only a once-in-a-while concern. We can also study things like how the impact angle, the target materials, and the velocity and type of impactor play a role in forming craters.

This crater will help us better interpret all of the others as well. I think this would be a really good crater to go get samples from, because we know when it formed and we have a lot of questions we can answer with that.

BS: How do you see human-made impacts fitting into this? In recent years, several spacecraft have crashed into the moon. Do you see any risks there or more opportunities to study craters?

JS: At this point, it's not too much of a concern to myself about human-made objects destroying natural habitats on the moon. Other spacecraft impacts, like the boosters from the Apollo program, made craters a long time ago. But I think, as there are more people and countries and even companies going to the moon, they'll have to get coordinated so as to not interfere with each other's activities — because that would be a problem. It's just a reminder like, "Hey, guys; you need to talk to each other and get coordinated and make sure you're keeping track of these impacts and your debris, and you're working together."

Otherwise, those craters are interesting because we know the impactor's mass and shape beforehand. It gives us a new insight into how craters form when you have irregularly shaped masses, like hollow cylinders and things like that. They'll also tell us about the moon's surface as well, because it's a different type of impact and it's got a different kind of energy to it and a different shape. So we do learn a lot about the cratering process in general from those.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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'> 'Once every 130 years': A huge new crater on the moon could be a giant leap for lunar science, researcher says

"We believe this woman was a kind of cast-off after death. She was buried face-down, suggesting a discriminatory attitude," study co-author Qian Wang, a biological anthropologist at Texas A&M University, told Live Science in an email. "Her burial, alone, in a place without her family or community, could be a decision of disapproval."

The woman's skeleton was discovered among 300 others in 2019 during an excavation of the Sanzhiyuan cemetery in China's eastern Henan province, according to Wang and colleagues' study, which was published in the November issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. She had been buried face down in a wooden coffin on the southern edge of the cemetery, with only a copper hairpin. Radiocarbon dating revealed she lived between 1298 and 1404, which corresponds to either the Yuan dynasty or the early Ming dynasty.

But because the original excavation was a rapid salvage dig ahead of construction, the unique skull was not recognized as a possible case of nasal amputation until study first author Yawei Zhou, an archaeologist at Zhengzhou University, analyzed the skeletons from the cemetery in 2024.

The most obvious indication that the skull was unique was its enlarged piriform aperture, the anatomical term for the nose opening, the researchers wrote in the study. They noticed that the woman's two nasal bones had been partially amputated, leaving only about half of the bridge of her nose. Upon closer examination, they noted that several bones inside the woman's nose had been broken, with signs of healing at the edges. These injuries would have given the middle of the woman's face a "hollow appearance," the researchers wrote.

Although they could not completely rule out the possibility that this woman's facial disfigurement was the result of a disease or a birth defect, the researchers concluded that the most likely explanation, particularly in light of her unusual face-down burial position, was a case of nasal amputation as punishment for a crime.

"In ancient China's agriculture-based economy, theft of livestock such as cattle and donkey was not uncommon, yet there could be other reasons, such as adultery," Wang said. "At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, such a felony was punished by nasal amputation."

Archaeologists know about punitive nasal amputation because it was first recorded in ancient Chinese oracle bone inscriptions. In the Shang dynasty (1600 to 1046 B.C.), the punishment was depicted in Chinese characters as a knife on the left or right side of the nose, the researchers wrote in the study.

"I was surprised by this discovery," Wang said, "because so far no scientific report or description of any cases of penal nasal amputation" in archaeological skeletons has been published. But since nasal amputation without anesthesia was one of the "Five Punishments" in early dynastic China — along with tattooing, foot amputation, castration, and death — "there could be many cases in history," Wang said. "People of any walk could be driven to livestock stealing for reasons such as poverty or making quick money."

Elizabeth Berger, a bioarchaeologist at the University of California, Riverside who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email that the study makes a convincing case for punitive nasal amputation as the cause of the woman's disfigurement.

Given this case study, Berger said, "researchers can look for other cases, and hopefully more evidence can be found of who was subjected to this punishment, how it was carried out, and how it was medically managed afterwards, including the use of prosthetics."

The unusual skull from the Sanzhiyuan cemetery was assessed within the framework of the Global History of Health Project's Asia Module, which Wang leads. "Many more skeletons will be screened in the future for diseases and trauma," Wang said. "Hopefully there will be similar cases to be found in the future in a clearer archaeological context."

'> 700-year-old skull from China is first ever skeletal evidence of nose amputation A patch of bright-white salt at the summit of the Sahara's tallest volcano

Who took the photo? An unnamed astronaut on board the International Space Station

When was it taken? Dec. 29, 2024