NASA Spacecraft Spots Something on the Moon Surrounded by a Mysterious Cold Spot That Wasn’t There Before

A research team led by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory scientists has identified a new impact crater on the Moon, dubbed McGetchin crater, surrounded by a mysterious cold spot that was not present before. The crater is about 222 meters in diameter and is considered one of the largest since NASA’s LRO mission began in 2009. The cold spot is estimated to be ~7 km wide and is believed to have formed in the Spring of 2024. The team noted that the crater’s pristine state and size make it an exceptional natural experiment for studying the lunar surface’s reaction to a fresh impact.

The research team found that the cold spot anomalies increased with crater size, supporting the idea that larger impacts result in more regolith decompaction. The crater’s temperature difference is 8 to 9 kelvin cooler than its surrounding area, consistent with decompaction of the upper centimeters to decimeters of regolith. The study authors said the cold spots fade extremely slowly, on timescales of 100 ka to 2 Ma, making them reliable dating markers for some of the Moon’s youngest impact craters. The team found that all craters larger than 30 meters produced detectable cold spots, suggesting cold spot formation is a common consequence of fresh lunar impacts.

The discovery provides a unique opportunity to study surface modification by a pristine impact, before it is permanently changed by space weathering and other surface processes. The study supports the decompaction theory, which suggests that the observed temperature difference is due to reduced density in the upper centimeters of the regolith. The findings will improve our understanding of cold spot formation and provide a calibration for the fading timescale of cold spots, potentially enabling age estimates for some of the youngest craters on the Moon.

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