Something Struck the Moon—and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Just Found the Crater

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured the clearest images yet of a newly formed impact site on the Moon. The 60-foot-wide crater was formed on August 5, 2026, as the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket slammed into the lunar surface. The LRO team used precise timing to capture images of the impact site, which required the spacecraft to tilt to point its Narrow-Angle Camera toward the impact location. The images revealed the best images of where the rocket made impact to date. The rocket was part of Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which was launched in January 2025. The upper stage was never intended to collide with the Moon, but after carrying the mission to space, it entered a highly elliptical orbit that subjected it to intense solar radiation and gravitational tugs from both the Earth and the Moon. The resulting deviations altered its trajectory enough that the rocket was placed on an unavoidable lunar collision course. The LRO traveled approximately one mile per second in its orbit around the Moon, completing a pole-to-pole orbit roughly every two hours. The images were captured with the LRO’s camera, which had to be tilted and timed to within a window of less than ten seconds to prevent the newly formed lunar feature from being shifted several miles beyond the field of view.

• The LRO captured images of a 60-foot-wide crater formed on August 5, 2026, by the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
• The images were taken using the LRO’s Narrow-Angle Camera, which required precise timing to avoid shifting the crater.
• The impact site was located within 0.6 miles of NASA’s original predicted location, as determined by the South Korean Space Agency.

The images revealed the crater and patterns in the surrounding landscape, with darker material visible in the crater and brighter rays indicating subsurface material that had been blasted outward. The LRO team coordinated with professionals and amateurs to reconstruct the rocket’s trajectory using publicly available data. The images offer one of the clearest views of a new crater on the lunar surface, and one produced by an object originating from Earth. The findings highlight the importance of precise imaging and coordination in identifying lunar impact sites.

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