A SpaceX Rocket Stage Hit the Moon — LRO Images the Crater It Left

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has photographed a fresh crater on the Moon, formed after a discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stage struck the lunar surface on August 5, 2026. The spent upper stage — the rocket's final section, which separates from the main body once its fuel is used — had launched in January 2025 as part of Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 mission to the Moon.

Capturing the impact site took precise timing. LRO circles the Moon from pole to pole once every two hours while the Moon rotates slowly beneath it, so engineers had to wait six days for the crater to come into view. They then tilted the spacecraft's cameras toward the site as LRO passed about 60 miles above the surface at roughly 1 mile per second — a shot taken 10 seconds too early or late would have missed the target by about 10 miles.

Images taken from several angles and lighting conditions show a crater about 60 feet wide and less than 10 feet deep, measured from the length of its shadow. Bright and dark rays radiate outward from the crater: the darker streaks are surface dust and rock weathered over time by solar wind and micrometeorite impacts, while the brighter rays are fresher material excavated from deeper underground.

Locating the crater was an international effort. Independent astronomers first worked out the rocket stage's trajectory from publicly available tracking data. NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, used the event to test its impact-prediction methods and shared its calculated site with South Korea's Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (Danuri) team, whose camera photographed the crater first — confirming NASA's prediction to within about 0.6 miles.

Danuri then passed the crater's coordinates to the LRO team, which compared new and pre-impact images to refine the site's location to 19.4759°N, 266.7138°E, at an elevation of 511 meters.