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Miami (USA), Aug 5 (EFE) – A SpaceX upper stage unintentionally impacted the lunar surface early Wednesday morning, NASA confirmed.
In a video released on X, NASA described the event as safe and posing no risk to Earth or to missions operating on the Moon.
The upper stage belonged to a 2025 launch that deployed the Blue Ghost One lander, built by Firefly Aerospace, as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, a commercial service for transporting scientific and technological payloads to the lunar surface.
According to NASA, the impact occurred due to a combination of solar activity and gravitational forces that altered the object’s trajectory.
“NASA did not deliberately plan for this upper stage to impact the Moon,” a spokesperson for the agency explained in the video, noting that this type of hardware disposal is an accepted practice in lunar operations.
“This is actually a technically accepted and safe method for disposing of equipment in low lunar orbit,”
the agency stated. It added that some mission operators choose to end their operations by impacting their equipment on the lunar surface because “it’s a predictable and traceable strategy for disposing of end-of-life hardware.”
The impact poses absolutely no danger to anyone on Earth or to any equipment on the Moon, NASA noted.
“Scientists are eager to study this impact event, as it may help us better understand how to track things like this in the future,” it said.
NASA explained that the Moon serves as a “natural laboratory for studying processes that occur throughout the solar system” because it lacks an atmosphere and its surface remains stable for long periods.
Studying these types of impacts allows scientists to analyze crater formation, a phenomenon that occurs on various bodies in the solar system.
“By impacting an object of known size at a known speed against the lunar surface, scientists can understand the process of impact crater formation and what type of crater results from an impact of that size,”
the agency explained. It noted that the Moon has been constantly bombarded throughout its roughly 4 billion-year history. “Meteorites, asteroids, comets, and other objects hit the Moon all the time,” it stated.
In addition, NASA noted that the astronauts of the Artemis II mission observed several impact phenomena during their lunar flyby this year.
These included flashes of active impacts, or craters forming on the lunar surface, during the few hours their flyby lasted, the agency indicated.
