Fresh lunar crater McGetchin: a 222-meter record dated to a seven‑week window in 2024
TL;DR
NASA’s LRO data pin down the Moon’s 222‑metre McGetchin crater forming between April 11 and May 22, 2024—an unusually precise age for a fresh crater. Its gleaming ejecta and a seven‑kilometre thermal anomaly show how new impacts expose subsurface material at a boundary between mare basalt and highland crust and how space weathering darkens ejecta over time. Reported in Science Advances, two papers detail the dating method and the broader implications for ejecta distribution and regolith evolution. The IAU named the crater McGetchin in 2026, highlighting how such young features provide rare, date‑constrained windows into impact processes on the Moon.
- The Moon’s freshest craters are recognisable by bright rays of newly excavated rock and dust, which space weathering gradually darkens—and the new 222-metre McGetchin crater is so fresh that its ejecta still gleams, having formed sometime between 11 Ap Space Daily
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