NASA has published the first images of a lunar crater formed when the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket launched by SpaceX slammed into the moon at roughly 5,400 mph on August 5, after spending more than a year in space.
The collision gave SpaceX the distinction of becoming the first company to deface the lunar surface, according to a report from Popular Science. The 45-foot-tall, 8,800-pound upper stage had been abandoned in a high-Earth orbit since January 2025, when a Firefly Blue Ghost 1 mission exhausted nearly all its fuel reserves. According to a recent assessment from New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, pre-planned stabilization maneuvers failed instead of establishing a clear route toward decommissioning.
Tracking the Wayward Booster to Impact
Over the ensuing weeks, natural gravitational forces altered the upper stage’s trajectory, putting it on a direct crash course with Earth’s natural satellite. Astronomers and advocates spent months drawing attention to the avoidable accident in the hopes of preventing similar issues in the future. Despite these warnings, the upper stage smacked into Earth’s only natural satellite at seven times the speed of sound on August 5.
Ahead of 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, gradually honing their assessments to identify potential impact locations. They then relayed their information to a team in South Korea, where astronomers 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.
Capturing the Aftermath From Orbit
To photograph the new crater, NASA next recalibrated its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) toward 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.
The orbiter circles the Moon from pole to pole every two hours as the moon rotates on its own course about 60 miles below the spacecraft, traveling at roughly one mile per second. Because of 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, as taking photos only 10 seconds off the mark would leave the subject 10 miles off-center. Preliminary assessments proved perfectly accurate, and LRO successfully took pictures from multiple angles under various lighting conditions, mapping its precise coordinates to 19.4759°N, 266.7138°E.
Analyzing the Lunar Surface Changes
The resulting images, collected between August 11 and August 12, reveal both older surface alterations and newly exposed material. The darker area fanning around the upper-left image is rougher than the surroundings, showing surface material altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. The brighter rays and splotch in the lower-right image mark fresher material excavated from deeper below the surface, with the pictures arranged in the order they were taken from top left to bottom right as the Sun’s lighting angle gradually changed.
While the collision stems from a preventable failure in orbital decommissioning, researchers are finding silver linings to the mess. The rarely witnessed event is allowing astronomers to learn from a lunar impact and its after-effects in near-real time.
