Getting the photograph took six days of orbital waiting. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter needed its own track and a freshly made scar on the moon to fall into alignment, and then had to roll onto its side so its cameras looked straight down at terrain 60 miles beneath it.
What came back is a series of frames captured between August 11 and 12 revealing a brand-new crater — 60 feet across and 12 feet deep, according to NASA’s figures — carved out by the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9.
Impact came in the pre-dawn hours of August 5.
Why the pictures took a week
LRO can’t simply be aimed like a backyard telescope. It sweeps pole to pole every two hours at a mile per second while the moon rotates beneath it, so any given patch of ground only swings back into view when the geometry happens to work out.
During one such pass, engineers rolled the spacecraft to put the Narrow-Angle Camera on target. That instrument can pick out lunar surface features as small as three feet across, which makes a 60-foot pit an easy subject — provided you can get it into the frame at all.
NASA also published before-and-after views of the location.
The dark streak is the interesting part
View the imagery from various angles and a darker streak becomes visible, fanning outward from the crater. That material is older stuff from close to the surface — dust and rock whose colors and composition have already been reworked by long exposure to solar winds and cosmic rays.
By contrast, the paler debris near the rim was excavated from farther down. The strike essentially flipped the ground inside out and left the evidence sitting in plain view.
An amateur called this in April
Back in April, independent astronomer Bill Grey was the first to raise the alarm that a rocket was on a collision course with the moon. Orbit-computing software let him pin down where and when it would arrive.
Grey and his colleagues also fed the numbers into a physics simulator, concluding the upper stage wouldn’t do much damage. Fair enough for a body 39 feet long, 13 feet wide, and roughly 4,000 kilograms, even arriving at 5,400 mph.
NASA’s measurements came in at 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep. Modest by lunar standards. But the hole exists, and it’s ours.
How a Falcon 9 stage ended up stranded
The stage in question flew the Blue Ghost mission on January 15, 2025, lofting two lunar landers into orbit. Delivering them where they needed to go consumed nearly all its propellant, with none left over for a trip home.
And so it wandered. Gravity and solar activity handled the rest, until the moon finally claimed it.
Anyone looking for a tangible price tag on space junk now has one. It’s a 12-foot-deep pit ringed in bright ejecta, shot from 60 miles overhead, in a place on the moon that looked entirely different a fortnight ago.