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NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has captured images of a newly formed crater on the Moon created when a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage crashed into the lunar surface on August 5.
The rocket stage had been used in January 2025 to launch Firefly’s Blue Ghost 1 mission.
LRO photographed the impact site between August 11 and 12 after engineers carefully maneuvered the spacecraft to point its cameras toward the newly formed crater. At the time, the orbiter was travelling about 60 miles above the Moon’s surface at roughly 1 mile per second.
Capturing the crater required precise timing. LRO circles the Moon from pole to pole approximately once every two hours while the Moon rotates slowly beneath it. As a result, the spacecraft had to wait six days for the impact site to reach a suitable position for observation.
The timing had to be extremely precise. A photograph taken just 10 seconds too early or too late would have placed the target about 10 miles away from the centre of the image.
Scientists observed the crater from multiple angles and under different lighting conditions. Images showing the crater rim allowed researchers to estimate its width at about 60 feet. Analysis of the crater’s shadow indicated that it is less than 10 feet deep.
The measurements were made using LRO’s Narrow Angle Camera, which can detect lunar features as small as about 3 feet across.
Impact reveals fresh lunar material
The images show bright and dark rays spreading outward from the crater. The darker material consists of lunar dust and rocks that have been weathered over long periods by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays and micrometeorite impacts.
The collision excavated this weathered material from depths of up to about 1.5 feet. Near the crater rim, brighter streaks indicate fresher material brought to the surface from deeper underground.
Global effort helped locate crater
The search for the impact site involved both professional scientists and amateur astronomers around the world. Independent observers initially calculated the rocket stage’s trajectory using publicly available information.
NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), part of the agency’s Planetary Defense programme, used the event to test and validate techniques for predicting impact locations.
Based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, CNEOS repeatedly refined its calculations before identifying the expected impact site. The prediction was then shared with South Korea’s Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, known as Danuri.
Within hours, the Danuri team used the spacecraft’s high-resolution Lunar Terrain Imager (LUTI) camera to photograph the site. The images showed that NASA’s predicted impact location was accurate to within about 0.6 miles.
The Danuri team subsequently provided the crater’s coordinates to NASA’s LRO team, helping researchers refine their own observations.
By comparing the new images with photographs taken before the impact, the LRO team determined the crater’s centre to be at 19.4759°N, 266.7138°E, at an elevation of 511 metres.