NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has captured the clearest images yet of a newly formed impact site on the Moon.

The 60-foot-wide crater was formed on August 5, 2026, as the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket slammed into the lunar surface, prompting amateur and professional astronomers around the world to watch for signs of the spacecraft’s impact.

Although no obvious evidence of the lunar crash landing was observed, six days later, NASA trained the powerful eye of the LRO onto the suspected crash site, eventually gathering several close-up views that reveal the best images of where the rocket made impact that have been captured to date.

A Rocket Collides with the Moon

The rocket that collided with the Moon was a leftover from Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which originally launched in January 2025.

Although the upper stage of the rocket was never intended to collide with the Moon at the time of its launch, after carrying the Firefly Aerospace mission to space, it entered a highly elliptical orbit that, over the course of about 18 months, subjected it to intense solar radiation and repeated gravitational tugs from both the Earth and the Moon. The resulting deviations altered its trajectory enough that the rocket was placed on an unavoidable lunar collision course.

Capturing images of the new crater was no small task and required precision spacecraft pointing. The LRO travels approximately one mile per second in its orbit around the Moon, which means it completes a pole-to-pole orbit roughly every two hours.

Tilting the spacecraft to point its Narrow-Angle Camera toward the impact site during successive passes, the images had to be timed to within a window of less than ten seconds to prevent the newly formed lunar feature from being shifted several miles beyond the field of view of the LRO’s camera.

A Scar Becomes Visible on the Moon

Fortunately, the LRO team has a good bit of experience when it comes to spotting and photographing high-resolution images of features on the Moon. The photos they captured between August 11 and 12 reveal the new 60-foot-wide crater, along with patterns evident in the surrounding landscape as lunar regolith was propelled outward from the impact site.

In the new before-and-after images, darker material can be seen, which has weathered over time due to surface exposure to cosmic rays, solar irradiation, and countless micrometeorite impacts. Contrasting with this darker surface area are brighter areas, visible in “rays” near the newly formed crater, where subsurface material that has retained lighter coloration was blasted outward.

Finding the Falcon 9 Impact Site

Before locating the impact site, NASA scientists coordinated with professional and amateur astronomers, as well as several space agencies from around the world, to reconstruct the rocket stage’s trajectory based on publicly available data.

Much of that data came from NASA’s own Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which helped to refine predictions about where the strike was believed to have occurred. Although normally part of the American space agency’s planetary defense efforts that track asteroids and comets that could potentially threaten Earth, the recent lunar impact served as a rare opportunity to test their prediction tools.

Once coordinates for the expected location of the impact were determined, NASA and its partners supplied these to the South Korean Space Agency (KASA), whose Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, or Danuri, and its high-resolution LUTI camera, were first to capture images of the crater.

At that time, it was determined that the crash site and resulting lunar impact feature were within about 0.6 miles of NASA’s original predicted location. Based on the KASA observations, NASA was able to supply the new information to its LRO team in advance of the successful capture of the new NASA imagery.

The resulting images offer one of the clearest views of a new crater on the lunar surface, and one produced by an object originating from Earth. Additional details about the photos and the technologies used to capture them can be found at NASA’s website.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

A portion of an out-of-control SpaceX rocket is believed to have collided with the Moon on Wednesday, producing a new impact crater.

The roughly 8,800-pound rocket stage is suspected of striking the lunar surface at around 2:35 a.m. EDT, with a force comparable to three tons of TNT, according to experts. The new impact crater and resulting cloud of lunar dust could help scientists glean new insights into how impacts have shaped the Moon’s surface over time.

As of 9 a.m. EDT Wednesday, observations have yet to confirm whether the collision occurred, although it was suggested that a faint flash of light might be visible in the suspected region, located near Einstein Crater, using Earth-based telescopes. No obvious signs of the crash were reported by amateur astronomers.

Additional imagery may have been obtained from any of the several ground-based observatories in the United States that were monitoring for signs of an impact, although analysis of any imagery collected this morning could take several days.

Imagery obtained by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is expected to capture images of the newly formed crater in the days ahead.

How Did a SpaceX Rocket Stage Collide with the Moon?

The rocket stage originated from a Falcon 9 launch in 2025, which carried a pair of lunar landers toward the Moon.

One was Blue Ghost, a lunar lander developed by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative under the Artemis program. Blue Ghost shared its ride with Japanese company Ispace’s Resilience lunar lander, with each mission aiming to promote a future sustainable lunar economy and provide transportation services for government and private-sector customers.

While most SpaceX rocket upper stages burn up in Earth’s atmosphere during reentry, or are deposited in the ocean following their launches, the stage from the Falcon 9 launch in question remained in space after its fuel was expended, since the lunar mission necessitated additional velocity to escape Earth’s orbit.

Despite these conditions, SpaceX had not intended for one of its rocket stages to collide with the Moon. It was revealed earlier this year that the combined influence of gravitational forces and solar activity was anticipated to alter the spacecraft’s trajectory enough to place it on a collision course with Earth’s natural satellite.

Having exhausted its propellant during its primary mission, the rocket stage had no way to perform course adjustments to prevent the collision.

“It’s very infrequent to have things like the Falcon 9 second stage crash into the moon,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during a live segment on Fox News. “It’s not a big deal right now. The moon has clearly seen better days,” Isaacman added.

No Risk to Earth, and Insights May Be Beneficial

Fortunately, NASA officials have confirmed there is no danger posed to Earth from this morning’s collision. Additionally, the impact could offer some benefits by providing scientists with a unique opportunity to observe a new crater’s formation, which may shed light on how such events have shaped the lunar surface over time.

Specifically, the fact that this impact was predicted well enough in advance to potentially allow for imagery to be obtained during or shortly after the new crater was formed, could provide rare insights into the dynamics of how craters on the Moon develop.

Additional information from the impact plume produced as lunar regolith is ejected from the impact site could offer valuable data for space agencies like NASA, which are currently preparing for a sustained human presence on the Moon.

Space Debris is Still a Concern

Although the impact this morning was largely benign, this incident does underscore the growing challenge of managing space debris.

Abandoned rocket hardware and other debris from space missions can pose long-term risks. While remaining in orbit, such materials can damage operational satellites or other spacecraft. Once they make their way back into Earth’s atmosphere, these leftovers from past space missions can sometimes survive reentry, even though they are designed to disintegrate when subjected to such conditions.

In recent years, a growing number of components associated with SpaceX rockets have survived reentry and collided with Earth. In May 2024, The Debrief was the first to report that an object discovered on a stretch of property in the Western North Carolina mountains was likely space debris from a SpaceX launch, which NASA officials later confirmed.

More recently, a series of unusual metallic spheres were discovered by residents of a beachside community in Australia, which were also confirmed to have been materials associated with a SpaceX launch.

Fortunately, no injuries or damage to property have been reported following these events.

As lunar orbiters begin returning images of the impact site, scientists hope the unexpected crash will provide a valuable new dataset for understanding one of the Solar System’s most heavily cratered worlds.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.