The photographs were captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) between August 11 and 12, and show the impact formed by a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage striking the Moon’s surface on August 5.<\/p>\n
Scientists from the US space agency determined the crater was 18 metres wide and less than 3 metres deep, based on the length of its shadow.<\/p>\n
The Falcon 9 launched in January 2025 carrying Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander, a private mission that made a soft landing on the Moon.<\/p>\n
These weren’t the first images of the crash site. The Korean space agency published pictures on August 6 that were taken a day earlier by Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), also known as Danuri.<\/p>\n
The LRO, in service since 2009, circles the Moon from pole to pole every two hours while the Moon rotates underneath it.<\/p>\n
A NASA statement said it was challenging to capture the image. To photograph a specific spot on the Moon, the spacecraft must wait until that location turns into view, which took six days in this case — and the spacecraft had to be tilted just right so that its camera pointed to the crater while it passed overhead.<\/p>\n
Timing was the other challenge, NASA said: “If the camera snapped even 10 seconds too early or too late, the target would drift off-center by 10 miles.”<\/p>\n
The images they captured from different viewing angles brought out different features, including brighter and darker streaks fanning out around the crater.<\/p>\n
NASA explained the darker streaks “are made of surface dust and rocks altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts” that was thrown up by the collision from 1.5 feet below the surface.<\/p>\n
The brighter streaks that hug the crater’s rim were fresh material excavated from deeper underground.<\/p>\n
Finding the crater site was a global endeavour that brought together leading experts and hobbyists.<\/p>\n
NASA said its Center for Near Earth Object Studies incrementally refined the trajectory until identifying the location of impact, which it then provided to Korea.<\/p>\n
The Danuri team in turn sent their coordinates to NASA’s LRO team to help refine their follow-up imaging sequence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The photographs were captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) between August 11 and 12, and show the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":573199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-573198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/573199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}