NASA’s LRO Captures New Lunar Crater Created by SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Impact

From August 11 to 12, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured a series of detailed images of a new impact crater on the Moon. The crater formed on August 5 when the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket struck the lunar surface after supporting the Firefly Blue Ghost 1 mission, which launched in January 2025.

To photograph the lunar impact site, NASA engineers carefully tilted the LRO spacecraft so its camera could point toward the crater each time the orbiter passed approximately 90 miles above the Moon. Traveling at nearly 1 mile per second, LRO completes a pole-to-pole orbit every two hours while the Moon rotates beneath it. Because the spacecraft could photograph the site only when it was within view, the team had to wait six days for the right imaging opportunity.

Accurately positioning the spacecraft was only part of the challenge. The timing also had to be extremely precise. If LRO’s camera captured an image just 10 seconds too early or too late, the target could appear as much as 16 miles away from the center of the frame.

Images taken from different viewing angles enabled scientists to examine the new lunar crater under varying lighting conditions. The photographs revealed a crater rim approximately 60 feet wide. Based on the length of the visible shadow, researchers estimated that the crater is less than 10 feet deep.

LRO captured these details using its narrow-angle camera, which can identify lunar surface features as small as 3 feet across.

The images also show bright and dark rays extending outward from the crater. The dark streaks consist of dust and rocks that have been altered over time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. The rocket impact excavated this weathered material from approximately 1.5 feet below the lunar surface. By contrast, the bright rays near the crater’s rim contain fresh material brought up from deeper underground.

Locating the Falcon 9 impact site required global cooperation among professional researchers, independent astronomers, and space enthusiasts. Independent astronomers were among the first to calculate the rocket’s trajectory using publicly available data. NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies also used the event to test and validate tools for predicting impact locations.

Based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the center gradually refined the rocket’s flight path and predicted where it would strike the Moon. NASA shared the estimated impact location with South Korea’s Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, also known as Danuri. Hours later, Danuri researchers photographed the crater with the spacecraft’s high-resolution Lunar Terrain Imager (LUTI) camera. Their observations showed that the predicted impact site was accurate to approximately 0.9 miles.

After imaging the crater, the Danuri mission sent the coordinates to NASA’s LRO team, helping engineers refine the spacecraft’s observation sequence. By comparing the new crater images with photographs taken before the impact, researchers updated the crater’s location to 19.4759 degrees north latitude and 266.7138 degrees east longitude, at an elevation of approximately 511 meters above the lunar reference surface.