NASA has released images of a new crater on the Moon left by a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage, according to Engadget. The rocket body crashed into the lunar surface in the early hours of August 5, and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the aftermath several days later. Engadget reports that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, took the images between August 11 and August 12. To get the shot, NASA engineers tilted the spacecraft sideways so its cameras could point down at the impact site while LRO passed about 60 miles above the crater. The imaging run used LRO’s Narrow-Angle Camera, which Engadget says can resolve lunar-surface features as small as three feet wide. The maneuver was not just a matter of aiming a camera: the spacecraft orbits from pole to pole every two hours at about 1 mile per second, while the Moon rotates beneath it. NASA had to wait six days for the orbiter and the crash site to line up. The images show more than a simple impact mark. According to Engadget’s summary of NASA’s release, darker streaks radiating from the crater are older surface material whose color and composition had already been changed by exposure to solar wind and cosmic rays. Lighter material near the crater rim came from deeper below the lunar surface. The rocket body had been flagged before impact by independent astronomer Bill Grey, Engadget reports. Grey used orbit-computing software to identify the object’s collision course with the Moon in April, and he and colleagues also used a physics simulator to analyze the expected impact. The upper stage was about 39 feet long and 13 feet wide, weighed roughly 4,000 kilograms, and struck the Moon at 5,400 mph, according to Engadget. NASA calculated that the impact produced a crater about 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep. Engadget identifies the rocket as the Falcon 9 upper stage from the January 15, 2025 Blue Ghost mission, which carried two lunar landers to orbit. The stage used most of its fuel delivering those landers to their intended orbit and could not make its way back to Earth; gravity and solar activity eventually brought it to the Moon instead. The report is a narrow but useful record of what happens when a spent rocket body remains in cislunar space long enough for its orbit to evolve. It also shows the operational complexity of post-impact observation: the object had to be tracked, the impact window predicted, and a lunar orbiter retasked to image a relatively small target at speed. Who benefits: NASA and lunar researchers gain a fresh before-and-after impact record from LRO imagery. Teams working on cislunar tracking and mission planning also get a documented example of a spent upper stage’s path to impact. Who's exposed: The named exposed party is SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 upper stage is identified by Engadget as the object that hit the Moon. The provided material does not support broader conclusions about liability, launch economics, or mission risk.