SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Rocket Is About to Crash Into the Moon—and It Could Be Visible From Earth

When you personal a robust sufficient telescope, you may be capable of witness historical past on Wednesday: A lifeless rocket goes to crash into the moon.

On August 5, at round 6:34 am UTC, a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 higher stage is anticipated to hit the moon’s sunlit western limb close to Einstein crater at greater than 5,400 mph. If it unfolds as predicted, the crash may throw up a plume of particles vibrant sufficient to briefly see from Earth with the best gear.

That might be a primary. No affect flash has ever been recorded on the sunlit face of the moon, and that is precisely the place the Falcon 9 crash is forecast to occur, kicking up plumes of mud that would stand out towards the blackness of house. The findings are primarily based partially on two new preprint research.

That features one posted July 27 to arXiv and led by William Jo, a doctoral candidate on the College of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell College of Engineering, that forecasts simply how large the affect may very well be. To foretell the plume, Jo ran the crash by way of a high-resolution physics simulation that allowed him to mannequin what would occur when 3,900 kilograms of hole steel hit the lunar floor. That’s completely different from solid meteorites making impact.

“It is like an empty eggshell, as a result of it had all of the gas in it, and there’s a rocket engine at one finish that is denser,” David Goldstein, an aerospace engineering professor at UT Austin who supervised the work, says of the Falcon 9.

Somewhat than burrowing in like a cannonball, the shell will collapse from its edges inward, throwing up a broad, low curtain of soil spreading so far as 183 kilometers huge in addition to a skinny, sooner spike practically straight up. All informed, the crash is forecast to displace about 12,700 kilograms of particles.

Jo describes the simulation as a “best-case” mannequin. The code is two-dimensional and axisymmetric, so it might solely simulate the stage coming straight down, engine-first, principally like dropping a pin on its head. However the true object—the spent stage of a Falcon 9 that carried two landers to the moon in January 2025—is way extra prone to arrive at an angle. A glancing strike would throw up a smaller, dimmer plume, presumably with out the massive spike.

“I might view our examine as probably the most optimistic when it comes to producing sprays,” Goldstein stated.

It’s an in depth guess on the form of the splash, however whether or not a plume will really be seen from Earth is one other matter.

Laurence Trafton, an astronomer at UT Austin, says it is doable, however laborious to know till the second of affect. Dimension is not the issue: A plume reaching 50 kilometers previous the limb would span about 28 arc seconds, astronomer-speak for an angle that’s roughly one‑sixtieth the obvious width of the moon within the sky. At that measurement, “it may be simply resolved by a small telescope,” Trafton writes in an electronic mail.

The brand new paper gives an estimate of the place precisely to coach a telescope. However distinction within the evening sky may very well be a confounding issue. The plume will likely be one thing like 30 to 300 instances fainter than the blazing moon beside it, and scattered moonlight will solely make viewing more durable. Catching it should require “a really regular mount,” Trafton says.

Timing will likely be on the observer’s facet. The plume ought to peak about 90 seconds after affect, “lengthy sufficient for an observer to witness,” Trafton says. Geography is just not, not less than relying on the place you reside.

The flash needs to be caught at evening. For anybody north of a line from Massachusetts to Texas, the moon will dangle so low that they’ll be peering by way of greater than 3 times the same old thickness of environment. Meaning viewers in these places will likely be trying by way of a murky, turbulent slice of sky that would wash out any indicators of the plume generated from the crash.