HELSINKI – The Falcon 9 stage used to launch a pair of commercial lunar landers is projected to impact the moon on August 5, according to astronomers.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and iSpace Hakuto-R Resilience lunar landers are scheduled to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket in January 2025, with the former making a successful landing. However, the upper stage from launch remains in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth with a period of about 26 days, taking it beyond the Moon. That will now soon end with the impact on the Moon’s surface.
Bill Gray, an astronomer, independent orbital analyst and author of the Project Pluto tracking software, said in a post that the upper stage, with the international designation of 2025-010D, will impact at or near Einstein Crater on the moon’s western edge at 2:44 a.m. Eastern (0644 UTC) on August 5, after its orbit was calculated based on asteroid surveys and observations made by telescopes. The projections will be refined in the coming months.
“The upper stage, 2025-010D… had a few close passes to the Moon and Earth, but nothing that was close enough to look like a possible impact,” Gray wrote. “Asteroid surveys observed it when it was not too close to the Sun or Moon to be seen. By February 26, 2026, we had accumulated 1053 observations of it.”
The U.S. Space Force tracks objects in orbit and updates a catalog of data from launches. It tracks objects mostly using radar, which is very useful for tracking objects in low Earth orbit, even gloves and tool bags lost by astronauts over the years, Gray notes. Telescopes are more suitable for observing more distant objects.
Swiss space situational awareness firm provided s2A system space news A short animation shows 2025-010D moving from the bottom-right to the center of the starfield, with periodic flashes indicating that the platform is falling.
The approximately 4,000 kg, 13.8 meter long upper stage is estimated to have impacted the Moon at a speed of 2.43 kilometers per second or 8,700 kilometers per hour. This event poses no risk and is unlikely to be observed from Earth, particularly because its impact is expected to occur on the sunlit portion of the Moon’s surface.
While Gray is confident of the timing and location of the impact being solid, he notes that even mild forces like solar radiation pressure, or sunlight, can build up over months and affect an object’s orbit. “But by August we will have a very precise idea of where it will hit,” Gray wrote.
This event would be a very rare example of an unintentional impact of an artificial object on the Moon. It follows the 2022 impact of the Long March 3B upper stage of the 2014 Chang’e-5T1 mission that created a double crater on the far side of the moon.
Gray first raised the possibility of that effect, although he initially misidentified the DSCOVR’s SpaceX Falcon 9 launch stage. In this case, the Falcon 9 upper stage has been tracked since launch.
