The crash involved the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket that originally launched on January 15, 2025, carrying two commercial lunar landers. While the rocket’s first stage — the booster used for liftoff — returned to Earth, its second, or upper, stage continued propelling the robotic landers on their path to the moon.
After the rocket’s mission was complete, SpaceX intentionally discarded the upper stage in space — but it later became clear that quirks of orbital dynamics had pushed the booster onto a collision course with the moon.
New images from a NASA satellite orbiting the moon reveal a fresh, 60-foot-wide crater formed by a wayward SpaceX rocket that slammed into the lunar surface earlier this month.
The crash involved the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket that originally launched on January 15, 2025, carrying two commercial lunar landers. While the rocket’s first stage — the booster used for liftoff — returned to Earth, its second, or upper, stage continued propelling the robotic landers on their path to the moon.
After the rocket’s mission was complete, SpaceX intentionally discarded the upper stage in space — but it later became clear that quirks of orbital dynamics had pushed the booster onto a collision course with the moon.
Researchers and space agencies scrambled to capture imagery of the vehicle’s landing site after it hit the moon on August 5. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, located at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, was among the first to detect the impact. And the Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, called Danuri, shared images on social media shortly after the collision.
Source: https://edition.cnn.com
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