A SpaceX rocket drifting impacts the Moon
The space debris was floating through space for a year and impacted against the satellite this Wednesday
A piece of a SpaceX rocket that had been floating in space since last year crashed into the Moon this Wednesday morning. The high-speed impact occurred at 2:35 AM in the United States – 8:30 AM in Catalonia – although it took several hours for scientists to confirm it.
The space object is debris from a lunar mission from January 2025 and, according to SpaceX, Elon Musk's company, natural cosmic forces pushed the rocket's remains onto a lunar impact trajectory. The company maintains that it is an accidental case. The rocket is the size of a bus and is the second stage – the second part – of a Falcon 9 that was part of a mission to transport modules and scientific equipment to the Moon. Although part of the artifact is designed to return to Earth, some parts detach in space and remain in orbit, unless they collide with a celestial body.
NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies concluded that this space debris was heading for the Moon after independent astronomers noticed it through public data.
Weighing 4 metric tons (4,000 kg), the object's body impacted the Moon at 8,690 km/h, but none of the spacecraft orbiting the Moon were expected to be in a position to capture images of the collision. However, the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), located at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, has detected flashes of light associated with the collision.
The impact occurred near the Moon's terminator, meaning the boundary between the sunlit and shadowed sides. NASA will track the booster with "training objectives" and also the impact site, according to its spokesperson, Jimi Russell.