Image Courtesy: NASA
A discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage has crashed into the Moon, creating a fresh crater roughly 60 feet wide and giving scientists an unusually detailed look at how lunar impacts reshape the surface.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the newly formed crater between August 11 and 12, six days after the rocket stage struck the lunar surface on August 5. The impact occurred after the booster spent more than a year in space following its original launch.
The Falcon 9 upper stage launched Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander on January 15, 2025. After completing its role in the mission, the stage remained in orbit before gravitational forces and solar activity ultimately put it on a collision course with the Moon. The new crater and the effort to locate it were documented by NASA.
Unlike Earth, the Moon has no substantial atmosphere to burn up or slow incoming objects. Its surface is therefore constantly reshaped by impacts. NASA estimates that a natural meteoroid with comparable impact energy strikes the lunar surface approximately once every six days, but collisions involving human-made spacecraft are far rarer.
Collected between August 11 and 12 by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, six days after a Falcon 9 upper-stage booster impacted the Moon, these images were taken from different viewing angles, bringing out different features. The darker area that fans around the crater in the upper-left image is rougher than the surroundings, as this surface material has been altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. The brighter rays and splotch above the crater in the lower-right image is fresher material that was excavated from deeper below the surface. The pictures are arranged in the order they were taken, starting at the top left and moving toward the bottom right, with the lighting angle from the Sun gradually changing from one image to the next. Each image is enlarged two times and shows an area of the Moon about 1,000 feet wide. Credit: NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines
Capturing the impact site required careful coordination. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was traveling about 60 miles above the surface at roughly 1 mile per second when mission controllers positioned its cameras toward the predicted location. Because the Moon rotates slowly beneath the spacecraft’s polar orbit, timing was critical. A difference of only 10 seconds could have shifted the crater roughly 10 miles from the center of the image.
The clearest LRO observations show a crater approximately 60 feet across and less than 10 feet deep. The spacecraft’s Narrow-Angle Camera can resolve features as small as about 3 feet, allowing researchers to compare the new crater with photographs taken before the impact.
The surrounding ejecta also provides clues about the Moon’s surface. Darker material was excavated from the upper layers, where exposure to solar wind, cosmic rays and micrometeorites has altered the soil over time. Brighter material came from deeper underground and had experienced considerably less space weathering.
Locating the crater was an international effort. NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies calculated the expected impact area, while South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter photographed the site only hours after the collision. The actual impact location was approximately 0.6 miles from NASA’s prediction.
The event gives scientists a rare opportunity to study a fresh lunar crater almost immediately after its formation, while also providing valuable data for improving models used to predict impacts from objects traveling through space.
