The upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has been stuck in a highly elliptical orbit for months, and in August, it’s due to smash into the Moon. Fortunately for astronomers, the impact will likely be observable, and they plan to take full advantage of this opportunity. A new paper that has yet to undergo peer review describes what astronomers should be able to see when the rocket crash lands near the Einstein Crater at 2:44 a.m. ET on August 5. According to the authors, the impact will occur on sunlit terrain near the Moon’s eastern limb from the perspective of Earth. Ground- and space-based observatories should be able to capture the impact flash, ejecta plume, and the resulting impact crater. “Both professional and amateur astronomers are encouraged to attempt observations of this event,” the authors write.
Incoming! The doomed rocket is the spent upper stage of a Falcon 9 that launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on January 15, 2025, carrying Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander and ispace’s Resilience lander. After setting the landers on a Moon-bound trajectory, the upper stage failed to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere.
Bill Gray, an independent orbital analyst and creator of the Project Pluto object-tracking software, alerted the world to the impending crash in April. He used his program to analyze the upper stage’s orbit and predict its future path, calculating the date, time, and speed at which it will most likely make impact. He expects the rocket to slam into the Moon at more than 5,400 miles per hour (8,700 kilometers per hour). That’s seven times the speed of sound. Grey is a co-author of the new paper, which is currently available on the preprint server arXiv. He and his colleagues fed his tracking data into an advanced physics simulator. This allowed them to gain a much clearer picture of what the impact could look like.
