A four-ton segment of a SpaceX rocket, which has been adrift in space since last year, is scheduled to collide with the moon at high speed on Wednesday. While this event poses no threat to Earth, it will result in the formation of a new crater on the lunar surface and provide an opportunity for scientific investigation.
This school-bus-sized object is the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that was launched in January 2025 to send a lunar lander from Firefly Aerospace towards the moon.
The rocket is anticipated to strike the moon at approximately 06:35 AM GMT, impacting at a velocity of 5,400 miles per hour (8,690 kilometers per hour). The collision is expected to generate a plume of lunar dust that, while likely to be illuminated by sunlight, will be challenging to see with the naked eye from Earth.
Nasa has indicated that the impact will create a crater approximately 60 feet (18 meters) in diameter and 12 feet (four meters) deep, ejecting dust and rocks outward as debris.
The impact is projected to occur near Einstein crater on the moon’s western edge, a region that is often difficult to observe from Earth. Nevertheless, Nasa plans to seek opportunities to capture images of the site both before and after the collision, as any data collected will assist scientists in “better understanding artificial impacts and their implications for exploration.”
Jimi Russell from Nasa stated on Tuesday, “The impact poses no danger to Earth, and Nasa scientists are preparing to gather lunar data from this event to enhance methods for tracking objects in space.”
Typically, rocket stages fall back into Earth’s atmosphere, either burning up or crashing into the ocean after delivering their payload to a specific orbital location. However, due to the increased thrust required for the January lunar lander mission, the rocket’s second stage remained in space, drifting among thousands of other pieces of space debris that operational satellites must avoid.
It was only earlier this year that astronomers confirmed that the uncontrolled rocket stage, having expelled its remaining fuel, was on a collision course with the moon.
Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX’s director of Nasa science and Dragon programs, explained to reporters on Monday that “a combination of solar activity and gravitational forces has set it on a path toward the moon.”
Bill Gray, the developer of popular astronomical software who published a report on the stage’s impending impact in April, remarked, “This may provide some—likely minor—scientific insights, and we could learn from it. However, it does underscore a certain level of negligence regarding the disposal of leftover space hardware.”
Impacts of space debris on the moon are uncommon. A Chinese rocket stage crashed into the lunar surface in March 2022 following a lunar test mission, while Nasa deliberately crashed a rocket stage into the moon in 2009 to analyze the resulting plume of lunar material. Additionally, several missions aiming for soft landings on the moon in recent years have ended in failure, including Russia’s nuclear-powered Luna-25 mission in 2023 and India’s Chandrayaan-2 lander mission in 2019. Israel’s Beresheet lander also crashed during the same year, carrying tiny tardigrades, which are known for their resilience to extreme conditions and may still reside on the lunar surface.
Nasa and SpaceX are currently engaged in discussions on strategies to prevent similar lunar impacts in the future, according to Scheiman.
This impending collision occurs as SpaceX reported a smaller-than-expected loss and a significant increase in revenue in its first quarterly earnings report as a publicly traded company. Despite these positive indicators, shares fell as investors expressed doubt about the company’s capacity to fulfill its ambitious promises.
With contributions from Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
