NASA IMAGES SHOW CRATER LEFT BY SPACEX FALCON 9 ON MOON

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured photographs of a new crater on the lunar surface formed when a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage struck the Moon on 5 August. The orbiter took the images between 11 and 12 August, passing approximately 60 miles above the impact site whilst travelling at one mile per second. Engineers tilted the spacecraft to angle its cameras downward as it passed over the crater, using the orbiter's Narrow-Angle Camera, which can detect features as small as three feet wide.

The Falcon 9 upper stage originated from the January 2025 Blue Ghost 1 mission, which carried lunar landers to orbit. After expending most of its fuel delivering the landers to their intended trajectory, the upper stage lacked sufficient fuel to return to Earth and instead fell under gravitational influence towards the Moon. Measurements of the crater derived from the photographs show it is approximately 60 feet wide. Reports differ on depth: one source stated 12 feet deep, another 10 feet deep, and a third indicated less than 10 feet based on shadow analysis. The darker material radiating from the crater consists of older surface dust and rocks altered by years of exposure to solar wind and cosmic rays, whilst the brighter material near the rim came from deeper underground.

Independent astronomers first identified the rocket's collision course in April using publicly available orbit-computing software. NASA's Centre for Near Earth Object Studies used the impact to validate tools and techniques for predicting impacts on celestial bodies. Capturing the photographs required precise timing; engineers had to wait six days for the orbiter and crash site to align, as any timing error of ten seconds would have shifted the target by approximately ten miles from the camera's view.