Lunar impact craters are the depressions left behind after an asteroid, meteoroid, or comet collides with the Moon.
Though craters are visible on worlds throughout the solar system, lunar craters are special because we can see them close-up, and the relative lack of erosion and other surface processes on the Moon keep them well-preserved.
Confirmed details from the source coverage
Moon craters fascinate us because they are a record of the process that built and shaped our entire solar system, the fingerprints of history pressed into the lunar surface.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has made a once-in-a-lifetime find of a newly formed crater on the Moon's near side, some 330 km from the edge of the Mare Crisium.
It’s the largest new crater found on the Moon by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) since it entered lunar orbit 2009.
But we can't say when the last crater of this size formed because the LRO has only been continuously monitoring the lunar surface since 2009, Glotch told me.
Context that stayed inside the record
The Importance Of Cold Spots Scientists working with LRO’s Diviner thermal instrument, found a 4-mile-wide area around the crater that is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than its surroundings, says NASA.
LRO’s Lunar Radiometer found that the new crater, like all new craters over some thirty meters in diameter, has ejecta that is colder at night compared to the surrounding lunar regolith, says Glotch.
NASA’s Apollo 16 lunar mission landed on a faint cold spot associated with the South Ray crater and the astronauts’ footprints within the cold spot were deeper than at other sites, the authors of a 2026 paper appearing in the journal Science Advances note.
Their young age has enabled their use in investigations of regolith thickness, the recent impact cratering rate and as potential source craters for lunar meteorites found here on Earth, the Science Advances authors write.