NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has 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, prompting amateur and professional astronomers around the world to watch for signs of the spacecraft’s impact.
Although no obvious evidence of the lunar crash landing was observed, six days later, NASA trained the powerful eye of the LRO onto the suspected crash site, eventually gathering several close-up views that reveal the best images of where the rocket made impact that have been captured to date.
A Rocket Collides with the Moon
The rocket that collided with the Moon was a leftover from Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which originally launched in January 2025.
Although the upper stage of the rocket was never intended to collide with the Moon at the time of its launch, after carrying the Firefly Aerospace mission to space, it entered a highly elliptical orbit that, over the course of about 18 months, subjected it to intense solar radiation and repeated 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.
Capturing images of the new crater was no small task and required precision spacecraft pointing. The LRO travels approximately one mile per second in its orbit around the Moon, which means it completes a pole-to-pole orbit roughly every two hours.
Tilting the spacecraft to point its Narrow-Angle Camera toward the impact site during successive passes, the images had to be 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 of the LRO’s camera.
A Scar Becomes Visible on the Moon
Fortunately, the LRO team has a good bit of experience when it comes to spotting and photographing high-resolution images of features on the Moon. The photos they captured between August 11 and 12 reveal the new 60-foot-wide crater, along with patterns evident in the surrounding landscape as lunar regolith was propelled outward from the impact site.
In the new before-and-after images, darker material can be seen, which has weathered over time due to surface exposure to cosmic rays, solar irradiation, and countless micrometeorite impacts. Contrasting with this darker surface area are brighter areas, visible in “rays” near the newly formed crater, where subsurface material that has retained lighter coloration was blasted outward.
Finding the Falcon 9 Impact Site
Before locating the impact site, NASA scientists coordinated with professional and amateur astronomers, as well as several space agencies from around the world, to reconstruct the rocket stage’s trajectory based on publicly available data.
Much of that data came from NASA’s own Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which helped to refine predictions about where the strike was believed to have occurred. Although normally part of the American space agency’s planetary defense efforts that track asteroids and comets that could potentially threaten Earth, the recent lunar impact served as a rare opportunity to test their prediction tools.
Once coordinates for the expected location of the impact were determined, NASA and its partners supplied these to the South Korean Space Agency (KASA), whose Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, or Danuri, and its high-resolution LUTI camera, were first to capture images of the crater.
At that time, it was determined that the crash site and resulting lunar impact feature were within about 0.6 miles of NASA’s original predicted location. Based on the KASA observations, NASA was able to supply the new information to its LRO team in advance of the successful capture of the new NASA imagery.
The resulting images offer one of the clearest views of a new crater on the lunar surface, and one produced by an object originating from Earth. Additional details about the photos and the technologies used to capture them can be found at NASA’s website.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.