SpaceX now has the dubious honor of being the first company to deface the moon, after a piece of one of its rockets crashed into Earth’s only natural satellite earlier this month. Now, NASA is offering our first glimpse at the aftermath.
Why did a rocket crash into the moon?
The culprit was a wayward Falcon 9 rocket upper stage, which typically disintegrates upon a guided atmospheric reentry.
In January 2025, ferrying two lunar landers during the Firefly Blue Ghost 1 mission drained almost all of one upper stage’s fuel reserves. Instead of a clear route towards decommissioning, pre-planned stabilization maneuvers failed and the 45-foot-tall, 8,800 pound debris was, “abandoned in a moon-crossing high-Earth orbit,” according to a recent assessment from New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Observers later discovered that natural gravitational forces had altered the upper stage’s trajectory over the ensuing weeks, putting it on a direct crash course with the moon. Astronomers and advocates have spent months drawing attention to the avoidable accident in the hopes of preventing similar issues in the future. Nevertheless, the upper stage smacked into Earth’s only natural satellite at seven times the speed of sound on August 5.
While the problem was preventable, researchers are finding silver-linings to the whole mess. Now, the rarely witnessed event is allowing astronomers to learn from a lunar impact and its after-effects in near-real time.
This image from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows two oval regions where the Falcon 9 upper stage was likely to impact the Moon, based on calculations by engineers with NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies. Both ellipses are 2.1 miles long and 0.4 miles wide. Both predictions use the same booster-trajectory calculations, but only the blue ellipse takes into account the lunar terrain (vs. a smooth sphere). The white dots show predicted impact locations, whereas the cyan star shows the actual impact site. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Popular Science
Predicting the impact
Prior to the impact, NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies used the occasion as a chance to test some of its methods and tools used to monitor potential threats to the planet. With the help of international astronomy professionals and hobbyists, the center tracked the errant upper stage for months, then gradually honed their assessments to identify potential impact locations. They then relayed their information to a team in South Korea, where astronomers there used the onboard camera aboard the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (Danuri) to pinpoint the crater. Danuri’s team flagged the impact location after only a few hours, confirming NASA’s proposed location was accurate to about 0.6 miles.
Next, NASA recalibrated its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) towards the newly formed SpaceX crater for a photoshoot. However, scheduling the images required detailed and precise calculations. First, engineers angled the LRO to allow its cameras a full view of the crater every time it passed over the region. Traveling at roughly one mile per second, the LRO orbits from pole to pole every two hours as the moon rotates on its own course about 60 miles below the spacecraft.
Given these parameters, it took another six days before the LRO cameras had the upper stage crater in its sights. There was no room for error, either. If the orbiter took its photos only 10 seconds off its mark, the subject would have already moved 10 miles off-center. Thankfully, those preliminary assessments were perfectly accurate, and LRO successfully took pictures from multiple angles. These produced images under various lighting conditions, allowing astronomers to see as many crater details as possible while also mapping its precise coordinates: 19.4759°N, 266.7138°E.
Collected between Aug. 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
Planning ahead
Based on their analysis, NASA now knows the upper stage created a 60–foot–wide, 10–foot–deep dent in the moon at an elevation of about 1,676 feet. Darker smears around the crater’s rim contain surface rocks and lunar dust called regolith previously altered by solar winds, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation over an extended period of time. Much of this material was kicked up from relatively shallow layers no more than 1.5 feet deep into the moon. The brighter blast patterns include more freshly exposed debris from deeper underground.
While the crash site won’t be cleared for the foreseeable future, better understanding the nature of such an impact can help NASA and other organizations better prepare for naturally occurring dangers like asteroids. More accurate assessments and predictions will also be vital if humans ever establish a long-term presence on the moon. At the very least, we owe it a clean-up visit.
The post NASA shares first images of SpaceX moon crash site appeared first on Popular Science.
NASA shares first images of SpaceX moon crash site
