MIAMI — An upper stage of a SpaceX rocket made an unplanned impact on the lunar surface in the early hours of this Wednesday, the US space agency NASA confirmed.
In a video published in
The upper stage belonged to a launch carried out in 2025 that allowed the deployment of the Blue Ghost One lander, from the American company Firefly Aerospace, as part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative, a commercial services program to transport scientific and technological payloads to the lunar surface.
As NASA explained, the impact occurred due to a combination of solar activity and gravitational forces that modified the object’s trajectory.
“NASA did not deliberately plan for this upper stage to impact the Moon,” an agency spokeswoman explained in the video, noting that this type of hardware removal is an accepted practice within lunar operations.
“This is actually a technically accepted and safe method of disposing of equipment in low lunar orbit,” he said.
The agency added that some mission operators choose to end their operations by having their equipment impact the lunar surface because “it is a predictable and traceable strategy for the disposal of end-of-life hardware.”
Safely
The impact poses absolutely no danger to anyone on Earth or any equipment on the Moon, NASA said.
“Scientists are eager to study this impact event as it may help us better understand how to track things like this in the future,” he said.
NASA explained that the Moon functions as a “natural laboratory to study processes that occur throughout the solar system,” because it lacks an atmosphere and its surface remains stable for long periods.
The study of this type of impacts allows scientists to analyze the formation of craters, a phenomenon that occurs in different bodies in the solar system.
“By impacting an object of known size at a known speed against the lunar surface, this can help scientists understand the process of impact cratering and what type of crater results from an impact of that size,” he explained.
The agency recalled that the Moon has received impacts constantly during its approximately 4 billion years of history. “Meteorites, asteroids, comets and other objects hit the Moon all the time,” he said.
In addition, NASA noted that the astronauts of the Artemis II mission observed several impact phenomena during their lunar flyby this year.
Among them flashes of active impacts, or craters forming on the lunar surface, during the few hours that their flyby lasted, the agency indicated.
