NASA’s LRO Images Falcon 9 Crater on Moon, Learns New Details

NASA Science reports that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed a fresh impact crater on the Moon created when a SpaceX Falcon nine upper stage struck the surface on August five, twenty twenty‑six. Engineers tilted LRO to point its narrow‑angle camera at the site, capturing a series of images between August eleven and twelve, six days after the impact. The crater measures about sixty feet across and is less than ten feet deep, with bright rays of fresh material and darker, weathered streaks radiating outward. Predictions of the impact location, refined by NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies and shared with South Korea’s Danuri orbiter, proved accurate to within roughly six‑tenths of a mile. These observations give scientists new data for testing impact‑prediction tools used in planetary‑defense efforts, helping improve models that forecast where future objects might strike planetary bodies.

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