A spacecraft orbiting the Moon has captured new images of a crater created when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stage slammed into the lunar surface earlier this month.

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NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) returned images of the site where the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket impacted the lunar surface. The leftover hardware is from a January 2025 launch that carried Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander toward the Moon.

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These images were taken between Aug. 11 and 12 by the Narrow-Angle Camera on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The new images give scientists a rare opportunity to study a fresh impact on the lunar surface.

The crater is about 60 feet across and less than 10 feet deep. Those measurements were possible because LRO photographed the site from different angles and under changing sunlight. The crater’s shadow helped scientists estimate its depth.

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Collected between Aug. 11 and 12 by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, six days after a Falcon 9 upper-stage booster impacted the Moon, these images were taken from different viewing angles, allowing estimation of the crater's depth.

LRO travels around the Moon from pole to pole, enabling full coverage, about once every two hours at roughly 1 mile per second. Because the Moon rotates beneath the spacecraft, engineers had to wait for the impact site to come into view, six days after impact.

Bright and dark material radiates from the crater. The darker material comes from the Moon’s older, (space) weathered surface, which has been altered over long periods by solar wind, cosmic rays and constant bombardment by tiny meteorites. The impact excavated some of that older material from roughly 1.5 feet below the surface.

The brighter material is newer. It was blasted out from deeper underground when the rocket struck, exposing material that had not been subjected to the same long-term space weathering. Those differences can teach us much about the Moon’s surface and what happens when objects collide with it.

The impact also provides a useful data to refine predictions around near Earth objects.

NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies calculated possible impact locations based on the rocket stage’s trajectory. The predicted areas formed elongated regions about 2.1 miles long and 0.4 miles wide. The actual crater provides a way to compare those predictions with what happened on the lunar surface. NASA’s images show that lunar terrain had an effect on the predicted location.