Dubai: Eleven hundred tonnes of moon went up on Wednesday morning, and nobody on Earth watched it happen. The upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9, designated 2025-010D, struck the Moon at 06.34 GMT on Wednesday 5 August, which was 10.34am UAE time. The object was travelling at approximately seven times the speed of sound at the moment of impact.
The rocket had originally launched on 15 January 2025, carrying two lunar landers, the American-built Blue Ghost and Japan’s Hakuto-R. Once those payloads were released onto their respective trajectories, the upper stage separated and remained in a highly elongated Earth orbit, influenced by the gravitational pull of both the Earth and the Moon, as well as solar radiation pressure. It remained in this unstable orbital path for eighteen months before finally colliding with the lunar surface this week.
The Al Khatim Astronomical Observatory, part of the International Astronomy Centre, tracked the event and produced the most detailed estimate of the impact’s physical consequences. Mohammad Shawkat Odeh, the centre’s director, said the collision excavated around 450 cubic metres of lunar soil and rock, roughly 1,100 tonnes of material. Under the Moon’s weak gravity, some of that ejecta could have risen as high as three kilometres above the surface before falling back, with faster fragments potentially reaching even higher altitudes. He confirmed the debris posed no danger to Earth.
Then comes the part that matters for anyone waiting on pictures. The observatory pointed its main telescope at the predicted impact site from one minute before the collision until five minutes afterwards, yet it detected neither a flash nor visible ejecta. Scientists had been uncertain about the visibility of the event from the start, as the rocket struck the lit side of the Moon. A preprint study by a group including NASA researchers previously judged that this made any impact flash difficult or impossible to detect, noting that no natural or artificial impact flash has ever been observed on the lit side.
Two spacecraft are involved in the search for the crater, and both work from orbit rather than from Earth. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is the primary asset for this task. It has been mapping the Moon since 2009 and holds extensive imagery of the surface, which is what makes a before-and-after comparison possible at all. NASA has confirmed that before-and-after images from the LRO will likely take a week or two to appear, putting the first potential pictures somewhere between the middle and end of August.
The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter will also look for opportunities to capture imagery of the impact site, a NASA spokesperson told Space.com. NASA has stated that its scientists plan to collect data from the event to refine techniques for tracking objects in space. No specific date has been promised for the release of imagery, because locating a crater roughly 25 metres across on a surface the size of Africa takes significant time, even when researchers know approximately where to look.
An orbiter cannot simply point at a spot on demand; it must pass over the correct patch of ground, in the right lighting conditions, and at the appropriate altitude to achieve the necessary resolution. Once captured, the images must be downlinked, processed, and compared against the existing archive to confirm the new feature is indeed the crater rather than a pre-existing geological formation. There is one loose end, however: detections by the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, suggest evidence of a plume, and Al Khatim is currently waiting on observations from other ground-based observatories and space telescopes before drawing final conclusions.
There is precedent for how this process unfolds. When a rocket body hit the far side of the Moon in March 2022, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter eventually located it, and the result was strange enough to justify the wait. It produced not one crater but two, overlapping, suggesting the object had significant mass at both ends rather than being a simple spent tube. If this impact produces anything similarly unexpected, the forthcoming photographs will reveal it.
A greyscale image of a small fresh crater, ringed by a bright halo of ejected material, might appear visually underwhelming to the public. Scientifically, however, it is invaluable. The value lies in the physics. When a natural rock hits the Moon, scientists are forced to estimate its size, mass, and velocity. In this case, they know all three variables precisely. This makes the event a controlled experiment of a kind rarely seen in planetary science, with estimates putting the resulting crater at 20 to 30 metres across and around five metres deep. Measuring the real feature against these predictions will provide data on the lunar surface that no natural impact could offer.
For now, the best account of Wednesday morning comes from a telescope in Abu Dhabi that saw nothing at all, and worked out 1,100 tonnes of moon dust anyway.
Source: Gulf News
