SpaceX rocket creates crater on moon
New images from a NASA satellite orbiting the moon reveal a fresh, 60-foot-wide crater formed by a wayward SpaceX rocket that slammed into the lunar surface earlier this month, reports BritPanorama.
The crash involved the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket that originally launched on January 15, 2025, carrying two commercial lunar landers. While the rocket’s first stage returned to Earth, its upper stage continued propelling the robotic landers on their path to the moon.
After the rocket’s mission was complete, SpaceX intentionally discarded the upper stage in space. However, it later became clear that quirks of orbital dynamics had pushed the booster onto a collision course with the moon.
Researchers and space agencies scrambled to capture imagery of the vehicle’s landing site after it hit the moon on August 5. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, located in Chile, was among the first to detect the impact. The Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, Danuri, also shared images on social media shortly after the collision.
NASA collaborated with the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA), using preliminary data gathered by Danuri to guide a narrow-angle camera on board NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) for clearer images, released on Tuesday. To capture imagery of the impact, engineers tilted the spacecraft to focus its cameras on the crater every time the LRO passed about 60 miles above the moon.
It took six days for the LRO’s orbital path to align with the impact site, and additional time to process the imagery. The imaging required extreme precision; even a 10-second delay could have caused the newly formed crater to drift as much as 10 miles out of frame.
Though the rocket collision was unplanned, NASA researchers stated the event did not pose a threat to anyone on Earth or to the lunar surface. “This is not something we’re really concerned about. This is actually a technically accepted and safe method of disposing of hardware in low lunar orbit,” NASA lunar scientist Kelsey Young said in a video posted to social media. “The moon is always being hit by things: meteors, asteroids, comets.”
Young added that scientists are using observations of the collision to learn more about the moon’s surface and to prepare strategies for shielding astronauts and future infrastructure sent to the lunar body.
