GoKawiilWhat just happened? The discarded upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched a pair of lunar landers in January 2025 crashed into the Moon at 5,400 mph on Wednesday, striking the lunar surface near the Einstein Crater after drifting through space for more than a year. NASA believes the impact occurred at around 2:35 a.m. Eastern Time, creating a new crater on the Moon's surface.
Scientists originally believed that the impact would be visible from most regions around the world, but space enthusiasts were unable to see anything, even when using purpose-built telescopes. While the tiny flash produced by the impact would have been far too faint to see in broad daylight, amateur astronomers documenting the event in darkness also failed to spot it.
NASA is believed to have captured photographs of the impact, but it could take several days for the images to be processed, analyzed, and released publicly. A spacecraft orbiting the Moon is also expected to send back images of the impact site in the coming days, offering an idea of the damage it caused to the lunar surface.
Explaining the reason behind the crash, Julianna Scheiman, director of SpaceX's NASA science and Dragon spaceflight programs, said the incident can be attributed to "a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces." She added that the impact does not pose any danger to Earth, despite sending around one million kilograms of debris up to 100 km (62 miles) into space.
The object that crashed into the Moon was an upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, weighing around four tonnes. While upper stages are typically designed to fall back into Earth's atmosphere and burn up during reentry or safely splash down in the ocean, SpaceX abandoned the Falcon 9's upper stage in space, causing it to drift for 18 months before crashing into the Moon.
Despite there being around 130 million pieces of space junk orbiting Earth at 11,000 mph or faster, impacts are extremely rare. Remnants of a Chinese spacecraft crashed into the Moon in March 2022 after completing a lunar mission, while NASA intentionally crashed a rocket stage into the Moon in 2009 to study the lunar dust kicked up by the impact.