NASA has captured its clearest look yet at the aftermath of a SpaceX rocket stage crashing into the moon, revealing a fresh crater and streaks of material blasted across the lunar surface. The discarded upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket struck the moon on Aug. 5, 2026, after spending more than a year in space. The 4-metric-ton vehicle had originally launched in January 2025, carrying a pair of lunar landers that included Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander and ispace’s Resilience lander. While Blue Ghost successfully touched down in March 2025, the Resilience lander crashed during its own landing attempt.
Falcon 9 Upper Stage Strikes the Moon
Following its mission, the Falcon 9 upper stage entered orbit around Earth at about the same distance as the moon, placing it on a collision course with the lunar surface. Independent astronomers and hobbyists tracked the errant object ahead of its demise, with amateur astronomer Bill Gray having spotted the rocket fragment in September of the previous year. The impact occurred at an estimated 5,400 miles per hour, according to details reported by Scientificamerican.
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Captures Impact Site
Six days after the collision, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) began photographing the impact site from about 60 miles above the lunar surface. The veteran spacecraft snapped images between August 11 and August 12 using its Narrow-Angle Camera, which is capable of resolving objects as small as about 3 feet across.
Capturing the imagery required precise maneuvering and timing. Engineers had to tilt the spacecraft so its cameras pointed toward the target region during each pass, operating while traveling 1 mile per second as the orbiter circled the moon from pole to pole every two hours. NASA noted that if the camera had snapped even 10 seconds too early or too late, the target would have drifted off-center by 10 miles.
Analysis of the resulting photographs showed that the crater measures about 60 feet across and is less than 10 feet deep. According to LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson, who is based at the Houston company Intuitive Machines, a distinctive V-shaped ejecta pattern on the south side of the crater is consistent with natural impactors hitting the moon at low angles relative to the surface.
Ejecta Rays and Subsurface Material
The LRO images reveal bright and dark rays stretching outward from the crater, providing scientists with clues about the material churned up by the high-speed collision. The darker streaks consist of surface dust and rocks weathered over time by solar wind, cosmic rays, and countless tiny impacts. NASA stated that the collision excavated this weathered material from about 1.5 feet beneath the surface.
By contrast, brighter material and streaks closer to the crater rim came from deeper underground, where it had been shielded from the harsh space environment. Viewing the site from multiple angles under changing sunlight allowed scientists to distinguish these unique features around the newly formed crater.
Global Tracking and International Collaboration
Pinpointing the impact site involved cooperation among international space agencies and independent observers. NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies used the event to test and validate tools and techniques for predicting where an object would strike the lunar surface. Its calculations placed the eventual impact site within about 0.6 miles of the predicted location.
South Korea’s Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (Danuri) photographed the crater just hours after the collision using its high-resolution LUTI camera. The Danuri mission then provided updated coordinates that helped the LRO team refine its own follow-up imaging sequence, leading to updated crater center coordinates of 19.4759°N, 266.7138°E at 511 meters elevation. Additionally, the European Southern Observatory detected sodium and lithium in the debris cloud thrown up by the crash.
