A piece of a SpaceX rocket left an 18-metre-wide crater on the Moon
NASA has revealed the aftermath of an unusual collision on the Moon. On 5 August 2026, a spent upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket crashed into the Moon’s surface, and six days later, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the impact site. A new crater, approximately 18 metres wide and less than three metres deep, appeared on the surface.
A Falcon 9 stage has crashed onto the Moon.
In January 2025, this rocket successfully launched the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost 1 lander to the Moon. Later, due to gravitational forces and solar activity, the stage’s trajectory changed, leading to its unplanned return to the Moon. NASA had calculated in advance that the impact would occur on 5 August 2026. It posed no threat to Earth.
NASA decided to use this rare event as an experiment: scientists wanted to test the accuracy of trajectory calculations and see what mark the man-made object would leave on the lunar surface.
Six days after the impact, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter began photographing the impact site.
Images taken on 11 and 12 August from different angles of illumination made it possible to clearly distinguish the edges of the new crater.
It was approximately 18 metres wide, whilst its depth, calculated from the shadow inside the crater, was less than three metres.
By way of comparison, this is roughly the diameter of a plot of land the size of a small townhouse.
The images were taken using the LRO’s wide-angle camera, which is capable of resolving features on the surface as small as one metre.
At the time of the imaging, the LRO was flying approximately 97 kilometres above the Moon at a speed of about 1.6 kilometres per second.
The engineers had to deliberately manoeuvre the spacecraft so that the camera was precisely aimed at a small area of the surface.
Moreover, a timing error of just 10 seconds would have meant the target would have been displaced by approximately 16 kilometres from the centre of the frame. It was precisely because of the nature of the orbit that they had to wait six days for a suitable observation opportunity.
The photographs show more than just the crater itself.
Light and dark streaks of ejected material radiate outwards from it in different directions.
The dark material was closer to the surface and had long been exposed to the solar wind, galactic cosmic rays and micrometeorite impacts. During the collision, some of this soil was ejected from a depth of up to 46 centimetres.
Near the rim of the crater, lighter-coloured material can be seen, which was dislodged from a greater depth. It has been subjected to less prolonged ‘space weathering’ and therefore differs from the surface.
Thus, the impact effectively exposed the upper layers of the lunar soil.
International collaboration between astronomers helped to pinpoint the future impact site.
Initially, the trajectory was tracked by independent observers, after which specialists at NASA’s Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies gradually refined the forecast.
The coordinates obtained were relayed to the team operating the South Korean Danuri orbiter. It was able to photograph the new crater just a few hours after the impact.
The actual impact site turned out to be only about one kilometre from the calculated point. The LRO team then used the refined coordinates to take more detailed images.
Why this matters
The fall of the Falcon 9 stage was not a scientific experiment planned from the outset of the mission. However, NASA took advantage of this rare opportunity to study the impact of an object with a known trajectory.
Such events help to test methods for predicting impacts and provide a better understanding of how small craters form on the Moon and how material is distributed around them following a collision.
The LRO has been searching for new craters for many years by comparing images of the same area taken at different times. It is precisely these observations that allow scientists to assess how actively the Moon’s surface continues to change today.