A four-tonne piece of space debris, travelling at more than 8,000 km/h, collided with the moon in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The impact, which scientists had been tracking for weeks, marks the accidental end for a Falcon 9 booster stage that had been drifting through space for over a year.
Cosmic wreckage finds its final target
The second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket struck the moon at approximately 2:35 a.m. US Eastern Time on Wednesday, slamming into the surface at a velocity of 8,690 km/h. The force of the collision is estimated to be equivalent to the detonation of three kilotonnes of TNT.
The derelict booster, roughly the size of an American school bus, had been on an erratic trajectory since January of the previous year. Its journey began after it successfully propelled two lunar landers — the American Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace, and Japan’s Resilience — on their path to the moon.
A mission cut short by a lack of fuel
Under normal mission parameters, the spent booster stage should have executed a controlled return to Earth, burning up safely in the planet’s atmosphere. However, a critical lack of fuel rendered this procedure impossible. Stranded in space, the cylindrical hulk was left with no destination but the moon, silently trailing the very spacecraft it had just deployed.
Eyes on a dark frontier
The most definitive scientific data and images of the crash are expected to come from powerful ground-based telescopes in the Americas, where the sky was still dark at the moment of impact. Researchers had anticipated the collision would be largely unobservable to the naked eye.
According to NASA projections, the remains of the rocket casing fell near the craters Einstein and Bell, located on the moon’s western limb — a region notoriously difficult to observe directly from Earth.
The impact is predicted to have carved a fresh crater between 20 and 30 metres wide and roughly 3.5 metres deep. The collision would have thrown up a vast, sunlit plume of lunar dust, a fleeting cloud marking the grave of a machine that could not come home.
