RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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A spent Falcon 9 upper-stage rocket will hit the Moon near the Einstein Crater on 5 August at 5,400 mph, releasing roughly the energy equivalent of three tons of TNT
The impact, though unintentional, was predicted since September 2025, giving NASA's LRO and South Korea's Danuri time to plan before-and-after imaging of the new crater
Its scientific value is a rehearsal rather than a measurement: no seismometers have operated on the moon since 1977, so the event mainly tests impact-localization methods for future experiments
At roughly 06:35 UTC on August 5 2026, a spent Falcon 9 upper stage will stop being space junk and start being a crater.
The object, cataloged as 2025-010D, is projected to strike the lunar surface near the crater Einstein at 2.43 kilometers per second, which converts to about 8,700 kph or 5,400 mph.
While this was not intentionally aimed at the moon, almost a year of advance notice separates it from the usual category of orbital accident, even as NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea's Danuri are being prepared to take before-and-after images of the area on the moon where it is expected to make its impact.
An increasingly crowded atmosphere
The object itself is the spent upper stage of the Falcon 9 which launched from Kennedy Space Center on January 15, 2025, carrying two commercial landers: Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1, which went on to make the first fully successful private lunar touchdown that March, and ispace's Hakuto-R Mission 2, which was lost shortly before landing in June.
Independent astronomer Bill Gray, whose Project Pluto software produced the original prediction, puts the stage at roughly 12 meters long, about the height of a five-story building, with a mass near 4,900 kg.
After separation, it stayed in an elongated Earth orbit with a 26-day period, swinging between roughly 220,000 and 510,000 km. Its path and the moon's path cross, but for 18 months the two objects have never met at the crossing point.
Gray expects a single crater around 17 meters across, reasoning by analogy with the double crater left by a Chang'e-5 T1 upper stage in 2022. The observation-planning paper led by Benjamin Fernando points higher , at roughly 27 meters across and 5 meters deep. Either way, the impact should release energy equivalent to about three tons of TNT.
There are limits to what can be measured from it. When NASA deliberately crashed Saturn V third stages and lunar modules into the moon between 1969 and 1972, those impacts were seismic sources fired into an emplaced network of four seismometers. That network was switched off in 1977, and nothing has replaced it yet. So while orbiters will photograph the resulting crater, the impact cannot be recorded seismically at all.
This will be only the second dead rocket known to have hit the moon by accident, after the 2022 Chang'e-5 T1 event, which China has never publicly acknowledged. Gray, for his part, says the episode points to a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware gets disposed of. Objects in low Earth orbit eventually meet the atmosphere and burn up. The moon has no such cleaning mechanism, so lunar impacts are permanent.
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