The McGetchin Crater's 'Cold Spot' Proves Thermal Signatures Are the Key to Lunar Resource Mapping

When NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter previously identified a record-setting 70-meter fresh crater on the Moon, astronomers focused almost entirely on the mechanics of the hole itself. The newly confirmed McGetchin crater, however, differs in one critical respect: its sheer scale has left a thermal footprint so massive that it forces a total rethink of how we map lunar resources.

The visual spectacle of a 222-meter-wide, 43-meter-deep basin—carved sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024—is undeniably impressive. But the true scientific breakthrough is not the crater. It is the invisible, 6.4-kilometer-wide "cold spot" surrounding it, a thermal signature that proves impact shockwaves fundamentally alter the density of lunar soil far beyond the reach of visible debris.

Writing in the September 16, 2026, issue of Science Advances, researchers detailed how an asteroid or comet the size of a three- to six-story building struck the Moon's eastern edge. The collision released an estimated 65 billion kilojoules of energy, an event expected only once every 132 years.

The feature went unnoticed until October 24, 2025, when Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist at Intuitive Machines, spotted an unusually bright patch in routine orbital data. "I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was," Wagner noted. "It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I've ever seen in one of these images."

AI

While the Narrow-Angle Camera captured the physical dimensions, it was NASA's Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment that revealed the true anomaly. Diviner recorded a 6.4-kilometer-wide zone around McGetchin that drops 9 degrees Celsius (16 degrees Fahrenheit) colder at night than the surrounding undisturbed terrain.[4]

This temperature plunge occurs because the impact's seismic shock "fluffed up" the upper centimeters of the lunar regolith. Less compacted dust and broken rock transfer and store heat far less efficiently than settled material, causing the disturbed area to cool rapidly during the lunar night.[2]

Traditional lunar geology argues that optical imagery and physical sampling are the most reliable ways to assess surface stability. Critics of thermal mapping point out that cold spots fade over time—typically between 100,000 and 2 million years—making them unreliable markers for ancient terrain.

Yet McGetchin provides a pristine, real-time control case that proves thermal imaging can instantly map soil density without requiring a rover to drill into the dirt. Because the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the exact region before and after the 2024 strike, scientists now have a calibrated baseline for how loose regolith behaves thermally.

AI

This matters immensely for the Artemis program and commercial lunar infrastructure. If a rover or landing module touches down on highly decompacted regolith, it risks sinking deeper into the dust or facing unexpected thermal extremes. The Apollo 16 astronauts experienced a milder version of this in 1972 when their boots sank unusually deep into the older cold spot surrounding South Ray Crater.[4]

The McGetchin strike demonstrates that the Moon's surface is far more dynamic than its static appearance suggests. By prioritizing thermal signatures over simple visual mapping, mission planners can now identify structurally compromised zones from orbit. The next crucial step will be sending a robotic probe directly into a fresh cold spot to measure exactly how deep this fluffed-up layer extends before the solar wind erases the evidence.[4]