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A SpaceX Rocket Part Just Slammed Into the Moon, Creating a Dust Plume and Crater. Here’s What Some Scientific Instruments Saw

The Korea Aerospace Research Institute captured before-and-after images of the impact site, and a telescope in Chile detected signs of the plume. However, no one was able to watch the collision live

Margherita Bassi
image zooming in on a spot on the moon's surface to show the impact
The Falcon 9 rocket's upper stage left its mark on the moon's surface.  Korea Aerospace Research Institute via X

Part of a Falcon 9 rocket unintentionally smashed into the moon on August 5 around 2:35 a.m. Eastern Time, as predicted, and some scientific instruments have spotted signs of it. However, no one was able to witness the much-anticipated collision in real time, according to the Associated Press’ Marcia Dunn.

Previous research, which was not peer-reviewed, had estimated the object would strike the lunar surface at a speed of about 5,400 miles per hour. NASA estimated that it would create a crater around 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep. But in the words of the New York Times’ Kenneth Chang, “If a rocket stage crashes into the moon and no one sees it, did it really crash?”

The answer, at least in this case, seems to be yes.

“I have Sir Isaac Newton’s personal assurance that it did indeed hit the moon; there’s no way for it to have escaped,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who retired from the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, tells the Agence France-Presse.

What’s more, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute’s lunar orbiter Danuri took before-and-after shots of the impact site. One of the agency’s images shared on social media highlights a dark spot on the lunar surface that’s present only post-collision—and presumably, represents terrain changes caused by the crash. According to KARI’s post, the spacecraft started eyeing the location around 30 minutes before the estimated impact time and carried out eight imaging sessions, reports Space.com’s Mike Wall.

a diagram showing before-and-after shots of the same location
Before-and-after shots snapped by KARI’s Danuri lunar orbiter highlight where the upper stage of a SpaceX rocket smashed into the moon. Korea Aerospace Research Institute via X

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile also observed evidence of the impact. It spied chemical “fingerprints” of sodium and lithium gas within the plume of ejected material, which stuck around for five to ten minutes, according to the organization’s social media post. The sodium probably came from the lunar soil, and the lithium might have originated from the rocket part, officials write. And team at Spain’s Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía shared a video of the collision’s ejected material, a subtle cloud emanating from the moon.

Now, however, the human-made object has exploded into “teeny little pieces scattered over the moon near Einstein Crater,” located on the edge of the side that always faces Earth, McDowell tells the AP.

The destroyed rocket part was specifically an upper stage. Stages are essentially rocket propellers that operate sequentially, each detaching from the spacecraft once it runs out of fuel. Falcon 9 has two stages. The one that crashed into the moon is the smaller of them, although it was roughly the height of a five-story building and weighed an estimated 8,800 pounds. It was used during a January 2025 launch that sent lunar landers from Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace and Tokyo-based company ispace toward the moon.

Did you know? The privately-owned Japanese lander also crashed

ispace’s lander, called Resilience, also slammed into the moon in June 2025. That failure came after Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost made a successful soft landing in March 2025. They arrived at different times because they took different routes to our celestial companion.   

The upper stage should have entered an oval-shaped orbit around Earth and eventually plunged into the planet’s atmosphere, where it would have burned up, reports Time’s Jeffrey Kluger. But it drifted from the planned route. “What has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon,” said Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA Science and Dragon Programs at SpaceX, during an August 3 press conference.

Although unintended, the crash was not surprising. Independent astrodynamicist Bill Gray first predicted that the upper stage would hit the moon almost a year ago thanks to orbit-tracking software. This also isn’t the first time a rocket part has smacked into the moon. In 2022, a booster from China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission met a similarly violent—and accidental—end.

The recent collision highlights, once again, the growing amount of space junk rapidly crowding Earth’s orbit.

“It is not a good thing to be randomly sending debris into the moon,” Hannah Sargeant, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in England, tells New Scientist’s Matthew Sparkes. “It’s not something we should be making a habit of. What if it hit a site of special interest? What if it caused damage to the historical Apollo landers?”

Humans currently have a small lunar footprint, but with NASA’s Artemis program aiming not just to return to Earth’s natural satellite but to establish an enduring presence, that’s probably going to change. And the moon, unlike Earth, doesn’t have an atmosphere to protect it.

“Things are going to get a lot busier near the moon,” McDowell tells the AP. “At that point, an impact like this on the lunar surface plowing up huge amounts of dust going for hundreds of miles around is not going to be acceptable.”

Margherita Bassi

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