What happens when a 4-ton rocket suddenly has nowhere left to go? On Aug. 5, a discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage slammed into the Moon after drifting through space for months. Now, NASA images have revealed the mark it left behind: a fresh crater roughly 60 feet wide.
• NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the impact site.
• The crater is about 18 meters wide and less than 3 meters deep.
• The impact scattered lunar dust and rocks across the surface.
The rocket stage began its journey on Jan. 15, 2025, when a Falcon 9 launched two lunar landers. Unlike the reusable lower stage, the upper stage was left in space after completing its job. Over nearly a year, solar radiation and the Moon’s gravity gradually altered its path until the abandoned hardware was sent toward the lunar surface.
• The Falcon 9 upper stage weighed about 4 metric tons.
• It spent almost a year drifting around Earth.
• Lunar gravity ultimately helped pull it onto a collision course.
Finding the crater was far harder than finding the rocket might sound. The crash occurred near Einstein crater on the Moon’s northwestern limb, where the impact was hidden from Earth by daylight. The rocket was also traveling at about 5,400 mph, producing a relatively small crater compared with those created by much faster meteoroids.
• The impact site was difficult to observe from Earth.
• Independent astronomers helped predict where the crash would occur.
• Meteoroids can strike the Moon at speeds exceeding 160,000 mph.
The first spacecraft to photograph the new crater was South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter, which captured the darkened impact site on Aug. 6. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter followed several days later, using its Narrow-Angle Camera to photograph the location from multiple angles. Those images allowed scientists to estimate the crater’s dimensions more precisely.
• Danuri captured the first images of the crater.
• NASA’s LRO photographed it from several angles.
• Scientists estimated the crater at about 60 feet across.
The NASA images reveal more than just a hole in the Moon. Light and dark streaks radiate from the crater, marking where debris was blasted across the surface. Darker material came from weathered soil near the surface, while lighter debris exposed older rock from deeper underground. A discarded piece of human-made hardware has effectively left a new geological footprint on the Moon, giving scientists another unexpected impact site to study.
• The crater contains clues about the Moon’s underground material.
• Impact debris created distinctive light and dark streaks.
• Human-made objects are increasingly becoming part of the lunar landscape.
Via: Live Science
