India, Sept. 5 -- A piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket slammed into the Moon on August 5 after drifting through space for more than 18 months. The high-speed collision kicked up a plume of debris and gouged out a fresh crater roughly 18 metres wide and less than three metres deep.

Images from Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), released on August 18, showed the impact site ringed by bright rays of excavated lunar material. No intact wreckage was detected.

The rocket had launched in January 2025 carrying two lunar landers, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 and Japanese company ispace's Resilience. Its first-stage booster returned safely to Earth. The upper stage stayed behind to push the landers towards their target, and the gravita...