A spent SpaceX rocket stage slammed into the Moon at roughly 8,700 kph on 5 August, and South Korea’s Danuri orbiter was there to catch it, before and after. The Korea Aerospace Administration released the images on 6 August, beating NASA’s own Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to the first confirmed photographs of the impact site.
KASA altered Danuri’s orbital path such that the probe could be flown around 340 to 350 km above the spot where the impact would occur at Einstein Crater so that images were captured just before and after the 4.9 tonne stage impacted.
With its high-resolution Lunar Terrain Imager, the satellite imaged the spot at an estimated five-metre per pixel resolution, while another instrument imaged variations in the reflectivity of the surface to determine the amount of ejecta from the impact.
KASA noted the similarity of this effort with the difficulty of photographing an impact between vehicles in Busan from an aircraft flying above Seoul.
The upper stage was launched in January 2025, transporting the Blue Ghost lander made by Firefly Aerospace and the RESILIENCE spacecraft by ispace towards the moon.
Falcon 9 upper stages are generally destroyed in Earth’s atmosphere through burning, but in this case, it had expended almost all its fuel during the journey to the Moon’s orbit, leaving it as space debris before gravity and solar forces brought it back down to Earth.
SpaceX stated that it had collaborated with NASA for the disposal process, adding that “a controlled descent is not always possible” for upper stages on such a trajectory.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman pointed out that meteoroids strike the lunar surface on an hourly basis, with impacts of this scale occurring roughly every six days, framing the event as more routine than dramatic.
