BUILDING-SIZED SPACE ROCK PUNCHED A 728-FOOT HOLE IN THE MOON AND NOBODY NOTICED FOR 18 MONTHS

Sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, a comet or asteroid roughly the size of a three- to six-story building hit the Moon's eastern edge and dug a hole 728 feet across and 141 feet deep. That is two football fields wide and deep enough to stack three school buses vertically. The impact was not detected when it happened. Nobody on this planet of backyard telescopes and orbiting cameras clocked the single largest fresh crater ever found in the solar system. It sat there unclaimed until October 24, 2025, when Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines on the LRO camera team, was paging through hundreds of old and new wide-angle images and noticed a bright spot with a dark halo. His comparison software throws hundreds of false positives from lighting and shadow, so he eyeballs every signal by hand. This one covered hundreds of pixels. "It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I've ever seen in one of these images," he said. The thermal follow-up is where it gets strange. The strike loosened lunar soil across a zone four miles wide that now runs about 16 degrees F colder at night, because fluffed-up dirt cannot hold heat. NASA puts an impact this size at about once a century or rarer, and the team's own number is once every 132 years. Two papers, both in Science Advances on September 16, 2026.

Why you should give a shit: The Moon just proved it can rearrange four miles of surface in one afternoon with nobody watching, and NASA wants to park astronauts and rover wheels on exactly that kind of dirt.