(CNN) — Part of a SpaceX rocket traveling at more than 5,000 miles per hour crashed into the moon early Wednesday morning.
The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, located at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, detected the impact.
“We can confirm that the telescope detected spectral lines of sodium and lithium gas in the impact plume lasting for 5-10 minutes after impact,” said Dr. Bárbara Ferreira, media manager for ESO’s department of communication, in an email. “The sodium likely originated from the lunar soil, whereas the lithium could come from the rocket itself.”
Dr. Benjamin Fernando, Reines Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in Experimental Science at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, also confirmed the detection made using the Very Large Telescope’s Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph, “which was looking for the spectral fingerprint of the rocket’s chemicals being dispersed over the lunar surface.”
Fernando said he and other researchers collected data from the telescope’s Enhanced Resolution Imaging Spectrograph, or ERIS, “an imaging observation which we will now start processing to look for a matching visible signature.”
Carl Schmidt, a research assistant professor of astronomy at Boston University who led the Very Large Telescope observations, said the impact occurred roughly at 2:35 am. ET near the moon’s Einstein Crater as expected.
The sodium and lithium gas plume was a few tens of kilometers in size, Schmidt said. Scientists predicted the plume would be the most visible aspect of the impact.
The Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, called Danuri, observed the upper stage prior to and just after impact, according to the Korea AeroSpace Administration, which shared images on social media Thursday.
The Falcon 9 rocket had lifted off on January 15, 2025, carrying two commercial lunar landers. While the rocket’s first stage — the booster used for liftoff — returned to Earth, its second, or upper, stage served as the workhorse to propel the robotic landers on their path to the moon and after its mission was complete, remained in space.
For missions heading to low-Earth orbit, the nearby region where the International Space Station circles our planet, SpaceX and other operators usually dispose of the upper stage by allowing it to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, said Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA Science and Dragon Programs at SpaceX, at a Monday news conference.
“But for high energy missions, we need to perform a different maneuver to ensure the second stage itself is safe per the appropriate rules and regulations,” Scheiman said. “We did that here for the Ispace and Blue Ghost missions’ second stage, and what has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon.”
SpaceX released a statement on social media Wednesday after the collision. “Impacts like this are rare, but they can happen with objects in these types of orbits, and we worked with NASA on the optimal disposal solution,” the company noted in the post.
Scientists said the crash posed no danger to Earth, but could create a crater with a diameter of 65 to 90 feet (20 to 30 meters) on the moon’s surface, according to a preprint study authored by Fernando and a group of scientists, including researchers at NASA.
The impact wasn’t visible with the naked eye from Earth — around 225,623 miles away — and proved tough to spot through telescopes as well.
Astronomers across the Americas, who had the best chance of witnessing the impact, aimed ground and space-based telescopes at the moon in hopes of witnessing the event. Imagery is expected to become available later.
Scientists can use this rare occurrence of an artificial object hitting the moon to learn more about Earth’s natural satellite — as well as prepare for how to shield astronauts and any future infrastructure sent there.
NASA is planning to create a more sustained human presence on the lunar surface through the Artemis program. But as more missions head for the moon, which does not have a protective atmosphere like Earth’s, managing the accumulation of space debris in lunar orbit will increasingly become an issue.
Watching a lunar impact in real time
Independent astronomers used publicly available data to track the Falcon 9 upper stage and determine that it was on a collision course with the moon, according to NASA. The agency’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which tracks the orbits of space rocks that could crash into Earth, and very occasionally the moon, also confirmed the impact trajectory of the upper stage.
“NASA will continue to track the booster for training purposes, as well as later observe the impact site for scientific purposes,” the agency said in statement shared with CNN ahead of the event.
Einstein Crater — the area of the lunar surface that the rocket’s upper stage, estimated to be around 8,818 pounds (4,000 kilograms), slammed into — is roughly “where the 10 would be” if the moon were a clock, said Dr. Paul Wiegert, a professor of astronomy and physics at the Western University in London, Ontario, who was not involved with the preprint study.
The study, currently awaiting review, has been submitted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The authors wanted to share their predictions for the impact ahead of time to enable astronomers to prepare for observing the event, said study coauthor Darryl Seligman, assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Michigan State University.
The impact flash, the moment when the rocket struck the moon moving at an estimated 5,436 miles per hour (2.43 kilometers per second), was expected to last only about a second at most. And since the part of the moon including the crash site would have been lit at the time, the flash would have been “muted by that brightness of the moon itself,” Wiegert said.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will try to survey the impact site in the coming days.
Earlier this week, South Korea’s space agency said any footage they capture will only be released to the public once analysis is completed, without saying when this is expected.
Space rocks regularly crash into the moon, and Apollo mission astronauts, as well as the Artemis II crew, reported glimpsing impact flashes as meteoroids slammed into the lunar surface. But impacts from artificial objects like the Falcon 9 upper stage have only occurred a handful of times, according to the study.
The event comes as SpaceX is under scrutiny around the release of its first-ever quarterly earnings report as a public company. The company’s shares have been on a rocky path since its blockbuster IPO in June.
Understanding lunar risks
An increase in lunar exploration means that more space debris may be likely to hit the moon in the future. Any space debris that poses a risk to Earth typically burns up in the atmosphere. But the moon has no air to protect its surface, Wiegert noted.
There is also no formalized tracking of debris that exists beyond our planet. Rather, surveys searching for potentially hazardous asteroids identify pieces of space junk that can then be tracked.
Since it’s difficult to track and spot objects that slam into the moon, a known event like the upper stage collision helps scientists gain insights into properties of the lunar surface, Wiegert said.
“What happens when an object crashes into the moon? We know it makes a crater, and of course it does eject material, but we don’t really understand that process in great detail,” Wiegert said. “And now that we have more spacecraft, and soon to have astronauts on the moon, we really want to understand that process better.”
Estimates suggested that the rocket stage might launch rocky material as far as 500 miles (805 kilometers) from the site of impact before landing back on the lunar surface, Wiegert said. If an event like this were to occur while astronauts and any habitats, hardware or spacecraft were within the landing zone on the lunar surface, it would pose a significant threat.
“The objects are small rocks traveling at very high speeds, sort of comparable to bullets, so we want to understand these processes so that we can eliminate that as a source of risk,” he said.
To that end, researchers are exploring ways to potentially lower the odds of such collisions.
“As a scientist, I also am very excited to see the observation,” Scheiman said. “But it’s one of the things that we’re working in partnership with NASA and the other appropriate agencies: What is the best future disposal path for high energy missions that are in the sun-Earth-moon system?”
This story has been updated.
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