Scientists say parts of a drifting SpaceX rocket crashed on the moon Wednesday morning, marking the conclusion of a more than year-long collision course for Falcon 9 lunar landers that were discarded into orbit last January
However, visual confirmation of the crash won’t be possible until likely next week when NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is set to fly over the crash scene and send back photos of the impact crater
Scientists who spoke to Global News and The Associated Press, though, say they are confident the crash happened as NASA had been expecting
“We can say with 100% confidence that the impact occurred at roughly the predicted time and place,” said Carl Schmidt, a research scientist at the Boston University Center for Space Physics
Schmidt said his team “measured a response from the rocket stage impact as a sodium and lithium gas plume a few 10’s of km in size lasting between 5 and 10 min after impact.”
Retired astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told The Associated Press that observations of the dead four-tonne upper stage on Tuesday night showed it heading straight for the moon
The anticipated crash site was a dusty, barren patch near Einstein Crater on the moon’s sunlit western limb — near the edge of the near and far sides, which is especially difficult to observe from Earth
“There’s no doubt in my mind” that the rocket “is now in teeny, little pieces scattered over the moon near Einstein Crater,” McDowell told The Associated Press
Dutch scientist Marco Langbroek also told The Associated Press he has “no doubt” the rocket met its doom
Once imaging is returned, it is expected to reaffirm what NASA had predicted when it said on Tuesday that it planned to try to observe the rocket’s crash: that the rocket’s upper stage would unintentionally slam into the moon on Wednesday, Aug. 5, which it suspected would carve out a crater forecast to measure about 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep
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NASA said the unplanned collision could have been avoided if the upper stage had been nudged into orbit around the sun, stating in a news release that “the impact poses no danger to Earth” and that its scientists are planning to “collect lunar data from the event and refine techniques for tracking objects in space.”
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Independent astronomers first identified the rocket’s trajectory using publicly available data, it added
NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which tracks natural objects travelling in space that could pose hazards to Earth, later confirmed the rocket had a 100 per cent chance of impacting the Moon
Due to its lack of atmosphere, the moon is struck by meteorites daily, though it is hit by man-made objects far less frequently
Meteoroids with the same energy as the upper stage that likely hit the moon collide with it about every six days, so the lunar surface is constantly absorbing impacts with the same force, NASA explained
Observing collisions can provide scientists with valuable insight into how ejecta plumes behave, helping to understand the moon’s geology and refine models that guide space exploration and research missions, it added
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The suspected impact would not have been visible to the naked eye, but scientists at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., were on standby with ground‑based telescopes to image it. The images are expected to take a few days to process, the space agency said
The impact flash from a collision of this nature would have been momentary, but the stream of ejected material should be visible to telescopes long enough to get a detailed look
“The gravity on the moon is low, and there is no wind to blow the dust away,” Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Benjamin Fernando told The Associated Press last week ahead of the anticipated collision
“Part of the reason for our interest in this event is to figure out how much of a hazard debris impacts pose to future astronauts,” he added in an email to the outlet
Although the predicted crash was unplanned, discarding upper stages on the moon or into space is an accepted practice. An upper stage helps launch spacecraft into orbit and then is usually released, sometimes onto the moon and other times into a graveyard orbit, to shift weight
“Many operators choose controlled impacts because they provide predictable and trackable end-of-life outcomes,”
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter will gather before-and-after shots of the crash scene. Danuri was set to stray within a few kilometres of the SpaceX rocket just two minutes before impact
The abandoned rocket segment — measuring some 40 feet and weighing around 10,000 pounds — hoisted two private lunar landers on Jan. 15, 2025
The SpaceX debris is the second dead rocket known to crash into the moon accidentally. A Chinese rocket segment dug out a pair of craters on the lunar far side in 2022
— With files from The Associated Press
