NASA found a fresh Moon crater the size of two football fields that formed in 2024 [qxMFykoe37T]
On April 12th, 2026, Universe Today published detailed coverage of a remarkable discovery made using NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter — a spacecraft that has been photographing the Moon from orbit since 2009. By comparing images of the same patch of lunar surface taken before and after an impact, scientists discovered a brand new crater that had not existed in any previous photograph. What they found stopped them. The crater is 225 metres wide — roughly the size of two football pitches placed end to end — and 43 metres deep with walls so steep you could not stand on them. It formed sometime in the spring of 2024. Nobody saw it happen. In the entire history of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission — 16 years of photographing the Moon — the largest fresh crater ever previously documented was 70 metres across. This new crater is more than 3 times that diameter. Planetary scientist Mark Robinson, who presented the finding at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference in Texas in March 2026, said that according to models of how often impacts of this scale occur, a crater this size should form on any given patch of lunar ground only once every 139 years. In other words, the LRO happened to photograph this specific area before and after a once-in-a-century impact — and caught something that had never been photographed at this scale before. What makes the discovery particularly extraordinary is the dataset it created. For the first time in history, scientists have metre-scale before-and-after photographs of a fresh crater this large. That data will be used to test and refine models of how craters form not just on the Moon but across the entire solar system. And the crater is a reminder of something easy to forget. The Moon is not frozen in time. It is being bombarded right now. It has always been. We just rarely see the evidence this clearly. Drop a 🌕 if this is wild. Something hit the Moon in 2024 and carved a hole the size of two football pitches into it while you were going about your day. You can look up at the Moon tonight and that crater is there right now — a scar that didn't exist two years ago. #shorts #moon #LunarImpact #nasa #spacediscovery #space #cosmicexploration #funfacts #universe #astronomy #facts #cosmos