WASHINGTON — A wayward part from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket weighing an estimated four tons and traveling at more than 5,000 miles per hour was expected to have unintentionally crashedinto the moon early Wednesday morning in a rare case of a man-made collision with the lunar surface.
The part is from the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and has been floating in space since last year. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on January 15, 2025, carrying two robotic commercial landers.
While its first stage — the booster used for liftoff — returned to Earth, its second, or upper, stage served as the in-space workhorse to propel the landers on their path to the moon and after its mission was completed, was left to drift in space.
Scientists estimate the collision will pose no danger to Earth, but will create a crater with a diameter of 65 to 90 feet (20 to 30 meters) on the Moon’s surface, according to a preprint study authored by a group of scientists, including researchers at NASA.
The impact had been expected to occur at 2:35 a.m. ET Wednesday but as of early Wednesday, there had been no confirmation.
Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX’s director of NASA Science and Dragon Programs, said in a news conference Monday the company followed “the appropriate rules and regulations” for properly disposing of the Falcon 9 second stage after launching it on Jan. 15, 2025, but “what has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon.”
According to NASA, independent astronomers first identified the booster’s trajectory using publicly available data, and its Center for Near Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California later confirmed the second stage “has a 100% chance of impacting the Moon.”
The impact was to be very quick and impossible to see with the naked eye. Even observers with very large telescopes were not expected to be able to see anything, according to a study about the collision released by almost two dozen scientists.
Before-and-after photos were to be taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter — a small satellite that orbits the moon — but it will likely take a week or two before they are seen, NASA confirmed. The space agency said its scientists “plan to collect lunar data from the event and refine techniques for tracking objects in space.”
“As a scientist, I also am very excited to see the observation,” Scheiman told reporters.
It was to be challenging or impossible to detect the impact flash because the impact was to happen on the lit side of the moon, according to the study. To date, no natural or artificial impact flash has ever been observed on the lit side of the moon, researchers say.
The moon is regularly pelted by objects, but they are usually natural occurrences, like meteoroids. The number of artificial impacts is relatively few.
The object is significantly more massive than most natural lunar impactors, but was also moving much more slowly, the study said. Still, the impact was to be the equivalent of 2.8 tons of TNT, according to the study.
NASA said the rocket stage was expected to leave a crater about 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep “and throw dust and rock outward as ejecta.”
“For comparison, a meteoroid with the same energy as the upper stage hits the Moon about every six days, so the lunar surface is constantly absorbing impacts with the same force,” NASA said. “Despite the disturbance, observing impacts gives scientists valuable insight by revealing how ejecta plumes behave, helping to understand the Moon’s geology and refine models that guide future exploration and science missions.”
The first man-made object to hit the moon was an intentional collision launched by the Soviet Union in 1959. A couple of U.S.-built spacecraft parts hit the moon during the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972. A Japanese robotic probe hit the moon in 1993 and a European Space Agency satellite collided with the lunar surface in 2006.
In 2009, NASA intentionally crashed the upper stage of a rocket into a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole to determine if water ice existed there. The impact exposed a plume of material that might not have seen direct sunlight for billions of years. The mission confirmed the presence of water ice at the lunar south pole, one of the major reasons why countries like the United States and China want to build moon bases there.
Like that collision in 2009, in the minutes following the impact of the SpaceX rocket, a cloud of lunar dust and possibly gas/vapor was expected to be lofted above the surface.
Carl Schmidt, a planetary scientist at Boston University’s Center for Space Physics, told CBS News he hopes by analyzing that data he could determine how much water ice was hidden below the surface on that part of the moon.
“Just about everyone who can point a telescope at this object is going to,” Schmidt said.
Source: Saudi Gazette