American researchers have discovered a new crater on the moon’s surface that is larger than the Colosseum in ancient Rome, Italy.
The NASA website announced on the 16th that the crater has a diameter of 222 meters and a maximum depth of 43 meters. It was formed by the impact of a comet or asteroid with a size similar to a 3- to 6-story building on the lunar surface.
Researchers said the impact would occur between April 11 and May 22, 2024, and an impact of this magnitude would occur only once every 132 years. This crater is the largest recently discovered in the solar system. The relevant research report was published in the American “Science Advances” magazine published on the 16th.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of this crater on the near-Earth side of the moon in May 2024. Due to the large amount of observation data, this image was not identified until August 2025. In the fall of 2025, the detector captured higher-resolution images of the crater, and the discovery was finally confirmed in early 2026.
Since its launch in 2009, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has discovered numerous craters. Mark Robinson, the lead author of the study report, said that these findings show that the two centimeters of soil on the moon’s surface will be completely turned over by material ejected by impacts every 80,000 years, faster than previously thought.
Robinson added that it is generally believed that the footprints left by the astronauts who participated in the US “Apollo” mission to the moon can remain permanently in the dust on the lunar surface, but this is not the case. These footprints will “disappear” in the long river of time.
