The stray SpaceX rocket that crashed into the moon about two weeks ago created a fresh crater wider than an NBA basketball court and up to 10 feet deep, NASA says.
The measurements come from the space agency’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which circles the moon from pole to pole every two hours. But getting images and data of the impact, which happened on Aug. 5, took six days because the spacecraft had to wait for the hole to slowly rotate back into view as the lunar surface turned beneath it.
NASA wanted these images to hone its ability to pinpoint fast-moving objects that slam into the moon — a dress rehearsal that could help protect future astronaut crews by improving how quickly and accurately it can track impact risks.
The rocket made moonfall near Einstein Crater, close to the boundary between the lunar near and far sides.
Getting the images was a bit of a threading-the-needle exercise. Engineers tilted the orbiter so its camera pointed at the predicted zone each time it passed overhead, while the spacecraft raced along at about a mile per second.
“If the camera snapped even 10 seconds too early or too late, the target would drift off-center by 10 miles,” according to the agency.
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The roughly four-ton Falcon 9 upper stage hit the moon after spending more than a year wandering through space. The crash wasn’t planned — shifts in solar activity and gravity slowly nudged the empty rocket onto a lunar collision path.
The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Jan. 2025 with two commercial lunar landers: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Resilience. After it released both spacecraft, the used booster stayed in space as intended instead of heading back to Earth. Blue Ghost went on to make a successful lunar landing, a first for a privately built spacecraft, while Resilience crashed during its own landing attempt.
In a statement earlier this month, SpaceX said the collision wasn’t intentional and that the company works “to be as responsible as possible with hardware left in space to ensure space safety.”
The new NASA photos show the crater under different lighting conditions as the sun’s position changed from one orbit to the next. In some shots, the crater rim stands out sharply, letting scientists measure its 60-foot width. Based on the length of the crater’s shadow, scientists could also estimate its depth.
Credit: NASA Goddard / Intuitive Machines
The images also reveal a mix of bright and dark streaks fanning out from the hole. The darker rays are made of older, “weathered” lunar dust and rocks that space radiation and tiny meteorites have altered over time. The collision dug this material up from just over a foot below the surface. The brighter rays closer to the rim come from more pristine material blasted out from deeper underground.
NASA didn’t find the crash site on its own, and it wasn’t the first orbiter to get shots of it. Independent astronomers used public data to trace the rocket’s path. Then, NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which tracks objects that could pose a risk to Earth, refined the predicted impact zone.
The NASA center passed the information along to South Korea’s Danuri orbiter team, which released its orbiter images on Aug. 6. The South Korean scientists sent the precise coordinates back to NASA so that it could home in on the rocket’s final resting place.
