1-Piece of SpaceX rocket believed to have crashed into the moon
The object is debris from a January 2025 lunar mission, with natural cosmic forces nudging the leftover rocket stage onto a collision course with the Moon, said SpaceX.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket's second stage, weighing 4 metric tons, was expected to crash into the moon early Wednesday morning. The school bus-sized object, which had been orbiting space since January 2025, was due to hit Einstein Crater on the moon's western limb. With a speed of 5,400 miles per hour, the impact was unintentional and resulted from the rocket's second stage retaining too much thrust for the lunar lander mission.
The crash would have created a plume of lunar dust, but spotting it with the naked eye from Earth would be improbable. Confirmation of the crash would likely come several hours later through telescope images from the Americas. While the impact posed no danger, it raised concerns about space junk disposal. This event wasn't the first lunar crash; China's rocket stage collided with the moon in March 2022 and NASA intentionally crashed a rocket stage into the moon in 2009 to study lunar material ejected during the impact.
NASA's Artemis program aims to establish a lunar base and send astronauts to the lunar surface in the coming years, emphasizing the need to prevent future space junk impacts.
Written by urgent.news from Free Malaysia Today's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
