TL;DR
In 2024 an object the size of a six-story building hit the Moon, leaving a once-in-a-century crater and proving the lunar surface is far from static.
The Moon has a new crater, acquired much the way you might acquire a regrettable spring break tattoo: in the spring of 2024, something the size of a six-story building slammed into it.
A white speck the software flagged
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed the Moon for 17 years. Its wide-angle camera sweeps up terrain, software flags anything interesting for humans to check, and almost all of it turns out to be a misfire. In 2025, NASA image-processing specialist Robert Wagner became the first to see the new dimple.
Switching to the narrow-angle camera, technicians measured it at 728 feet across — roughly two football fields — and 141 feet deep. The authors of a paper in Science Advances call it a statistically rare, effectively once-in-a-lifetime observation.
Where it hit, the ground runs cooler
A thermal camera found the four miles around the crater sitting about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the rest of the surface. The impact knocked the lunar soil loose, and fluffy dust does not hold heat well.
This churning is called impact gardening. The Moon was long thought nearly static, its top layer turning over once every 10 million years; a study a decade ago cut that to once every 80,000 years.
Time heals the Moon's wounds
The crater will slowly be smoothed away. The spring break tattoo, less so.
Why it matters
A fresh impact cuts a free cross-section through the lunar soil, letting scientists read underground structure directly. And with the turnover cycle revised from 10 million years to 80,000, the surface is busier than anyone assumed — which changes how long anyone building a Moon base can expect the ground beneath it to last.
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