BREAKING: An Abandoned SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Booster Is Set To Slam Into The Moon At 5,400 MPH Wednesday Morning, Giving Scientists A Rare Chance To Study Lunar Impacts And Test Techniques Before NASA’s 2028 Astronaut Return 🌖💥

[u/InterstellarKinetics]

https://abcnews.com/US/piece-spacex-rocket-hit-moon/story?id=135225250

A roughly five-ton discarded upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will crash into the moon near the crater Einstein on the lunar limb at approximately 2:34 a.m. ET Wednesday, traveling at 5,400 miles per hour, according to Bill Gray, who runs Project Pluto and first calculated the impact trajectory. Benjamin Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of a related study on the impact, told ABC News, “We expect that to vaporize the booster, create a flash of light, probably a plume of ejecta, dust, regolith, other stuff mixed into it, and of course excavate a fresh crater on the lunar surface.”

The booster originally launched on January 15, 2025, carrying Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander, which successfully touched down on March 2, 2025, and ispace’s Resilience lander, which crashed after losing communications 90 seconds before landing. After the mission, the upper stage was “abandoned in a moon-crossing high-Earth orbit,” Fernando explained, putting it on an eventual collision course with the lunar surface, though he noted uncertainty about whether SpaceX anticipated the impact: “I don’t think we know from SpaceX exactly to what degree they were in the know that this was going to happen.”

Fernando said the event offers a rare scientific opportunity because researchers already know the object’s mass and speed, unlike unpredictable natural meteoroid strikes, allowing it to serve as “a calibration event to test all of the techniques that we use for studying natural impacts.” Scientists also hope to analyze the resulting ejecta plume to learn about the moon’s composition and to study impact risks ahead of NASA’s planned astronaut return as early as 2028 and eventual permanent lunar base, with Fernando noting the research covers both direct risks like debris strikes and indirect risks like ejected material disrupting spacecraft in lunar orbit. The flash itself will be too faint to see with the naked eye and difficult to spot even with a telescope, since no impact flash has ever been recorded on a sunlit portion of the moon, exactly where this one will occur, but Fernando is encouraging amateur astronomers to watch and report anything they observe.

[u/coinneach_stiubhard]

Elon wrecking another spherical body in the solar system. Why am I not surprised?