Sunita Somvanshi
A NASA spacecraft has captured the clearest pictures yet of the scar a discarded SpaceX rocket left on the moon, showing a fresh crater about 60 feet across where the booster slammed down earlier this month.
An 8,800-pound SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage ploughed into the lunar surface at roughly 5,400 miles per hour on August 5, 2026, after drifting through space for over a year following a January 2025 launch that sent private moon landers toward the surface. The booster, about 45 feet long and 12 feet wide, struck with a force the space agency compared to nearly three tons of TNT.
On August 18, NASA released before-and-after photographs taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft that has circled the moon since 2009. The new crater measures about 60 feet wide and less than 10 feet deep. Dark and bright streaks fan out from the impact like butterfly wings. The darker lines are surface material reshaped over time by solar wind, cosmic rays and tiny meteoroids, while the brighter rays are fresh rock and soil flung from deeper underground.
The orbiter photographed the site about a week after the collision, from 60 miles above the surface while travelling at roughly one mile per second. Flight controllers tilted the spacecraft so its cameras pointed at the impact, and it took six days for the rotating moon to bring the scene back into view. South Korea’s Danuri spacecraft was the first to beam back images of the crater.
The moon is regularly struck by natural objects such as meteoroids, but impacts from human-made hardware are comparatively rare. In 2009, NASA deliberately crashed a rocket stage near the lunar south pole and confirmed the presence of water ice there, making the region a focus for future moon bases.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images were released by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center team.
