NASA images reveal crater left by SpaceX rocket crash on moon

New images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show the crater and debris left behind when a discarded Falcon 9 rocket stage slammed into the moon earlier this month.

NASA has captured its clearest look yet at the aftermath of a SpaceX rocket stage crashing into the moon, revealing a fresh crater and streaks of material blasted across the lunar surface.

The discarded upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket struck the moon on Aug. 5 after spending more than a year in space. Six days later, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, began photographing the impact site from about 60 miles above the lunar surface.

The new images show a crater measuring about 60 feet across and less than 10 feet deep, according to NASA. Bright and dark rays extend outward from the crater, offering scientists clues about what was churned up by the high-speed collision.

The darker streaks consist of dust and rocks near the surface that have been weathered over time by the solar wind, cosmic rays and countless tiny impacts. NASA said the collision excavated some of this material from about 1.5 feet beneath the surface.

Brighter material closer to the crater came from deeper below ground, where it had been shielded from the harsh space environment.

NASA’s LRO photographed the site from several angles and under changing sunlight, allowing scientists to distinguish different features around the crater. Its Narrow-Angle Camera is capable of resolving objects as small as about 3 feet across.

Capturing the images required precise timing. LRO races around the moon from pole to pole roughly once every two hours at about 1 mile per second. Engineers tilted the spacecraft toward the impact site during each pass, and NASA said taking an image just 10 seconds too early or too late would have placed the target about 10 miles from the center of the camera’s view.

The Falcon 9 stage had been traveling about 5,400 mph before the collision. It weighed nearly 9,000 pounds and had remained in a high Earth orbit that crossed the moon’s path after launching from Florida in January 2025.

That launch carried Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 lander and ispace’s RESILIENCE lander toward the moon. Blue Ghost successfully landed in March 2025, but RESILIENCE later crashed during its own landing attempt.

Scientists had predicted the Falcon 9 impact would create a crater roughly 65 to 100 feet wide and about 16 feet deep. NASA’s measurements now show the actual crater is somewhat shallower than predicted and near the low end of the expected width range.

Researchers around the world tracked the rocket stage ahead of the crash. NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies used the event to test techniques for predicting where an object would strike the lunar surface.

Those calculations placed the eventual impact site within about 0.6 miles of the predicted location, according to NASA. South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter photographed the crater just hours after the collision and then provided coordinates that helped the LRO team refine its own observations.

The impact was also monitored from Earth. Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope detected sodium and lithium in the debris plume for about 5 to 10 minutes. Scientists said the sodium likely came from lunar soil, while some of the lithium may have originated from the rocket itself.

The crash offered scientists a rare opportunity to study a precisely timed impact on the moon. As more spacecraft are sent to the moon in the coming years, observations from the Falcon 9 crash could help researchers improve impact predictions and better understand how debris spreads across the lunar surface.

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