NASA's Lunar Orbiter Images the Fresh Crater a SpaceX Rocket Stage Left on the Moon

Between Aug. 11 and 12, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) photographed a fresh crater on the Moon, formed on Aug. 5 when the spent upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket struck the lunar surface. The stage had launched Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 mission to the Moon in January 2025 before falling back and hitting the ground.

To capture the crater, engineers tilted LRO so its cameras pointed at the site each time the orbiter passed about 60 miles overhead, circling the Moon pole to pole every two hours while the Moon rotated beneath it. Because LRO travels roughly one mile per second, the camera had to fire within 10 seconds of the right moment, or the target would drift 10 miles off-center; it took six days for the site to rotate into view.

Using its Narrow-Angle Camera, capable of resolving features as small as 3 feet across, LRO measured the crater's rim at 60 feet wide and, from the length of its shadow, estimated a depth of less than 10 feet. The images revealed dark rays of surface dust and rock weathered by solar wind and micrometeorite impacts, excavated from about 1.5 feet down, alongside brighter rays of fresher material thrown up from deeper underground.

Finding the impact site required international coordination: independent astronomers first tracked the rocket's trajectory from public data, and NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory refined the prediction and passed it to South Korea's Danuri orbiter team, whose camera imaged the crater within hours, confirming the prediction to within about 0.6 miles. Comparing the new images with pre-impact photos, the LRO team fixed the crater's coordinates at 19.4759 degrees north, 266.7138 degrees east, at an elevation of 511 meters.