Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

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On 2026 August 5, within a few minutes of 06:35 UTC, an upper stage (section) of a rocket used for a lunar mission will hit the moon. This may be of some (probably minor) scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it. It doesn't present any danger to anyone, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of.

This is the second time I've identified a piece of junk as being about to hit the moon. That event got considerably more attention than I'd expected, including from non-astronomers. I'm hoping the following will answer most of the questions people are apt to have about this new event.

What is this object?

This is the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon 9 is SpaceX's workhorse rocket. These rockets have two stages. The first, larger stage gets the payload (and upper stage) most of the way to orbit, and then comes back to earth and lands on a barge, and can be re-used. The upper, smaller stage goes into orbit and can't be re-used. As you can see in the above image, it's still quite a large object, roughly the height of a five-story building.

Over 600 Falcon 9 rockets have been launched. Most of the upper stages are either in orbits close to the earth or have already re-entered the earth's atmosphere. A few are orbiting the sun. The object that will be hitting the moon has been orbiting the earth for a little over a year.

The object doesn't have a name, just an official catalog designation of 2025-010D. That tells you that it was on the tenth rocket launched into orbit in 2025, on January 15 of that year, and was the fourth bit of hardware to be tracked from that launch. The purpose of the mission was to launch the Blue Ghost and Hakuto-R landers to the moon. Those were designated 2025-010A and 2025-010B. They were held together by 2025-010C, a "payload canister".

2025-010D was the Falcon 9 upper stage, a rocket that propelled everything else from a low orbit around the earth into an orbit that could reach the moon. Once it had done that, all four objects separated from each other.

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