SpaceX rocket booster on collision course with the moon

A derelict SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster, weighing approximately 8,800 pounds, is set to make a dramatic, albeit unobserved, impact with the lunar surface early Wednesday. This rare celestial event marks a man-made collision with the moon, a consequence of orbital mechanics and solar activity.

The booster's journey to the moon began in January 2025, when it was part of a mission to deploy two lunar landers. While the mission achieved partial success, with Firefly's Blue Ghost-1 landing safely, Japan's ispace Hakuto-R unfortunately crash-landed, the upper stage of the rocket disengaged and has been adrift in orbit ever since.

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what has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon.

Now, after years in space, the booster is expected to slam into the moon at an astonishing speed of 5,400 mph. Despite the force of the impact, estimated to be equivalent to 2.8 tons of TNT, the event will likely go unnoticed by Earth-based observers. Scientists note that the collision will occur on the moon's brightly lit side, making any potential impact flash impossible to detect with the naked eye or even large telescopes.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will attempt to document the aftermath by capturing before-and-after images of the impact site. However, it may take a week or two for these images to become available. The impact is predicted to create a crater between 65 and 100 feet in diameter, approximately 16 feet deep. This event adds to a small but growing list of artificial objects that have impacted the moon, following intentional collisions by the Soviet Union, NASA, and probes from Japan and the European Space Agency.

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As a scientist, I also am very excited to see the observation.