Part of SpaceX rocket 'crashes into Moon'

A leftover piece of a SpaceX rocket has crashed into the Moon, giving scientists a rare chance to study what happens when something hits the lunar surface.

The empty part of Falcon 9 rocket hit near Einstein Crater on the side of the Moon that faces the Earth before 8am UK time on Wednesday.

It smashed into the lunar surface at around 5,400 miles per hour - seven times the speed of sound.

American space agency, Nasa says there is no risk to us here on Earth and that they will "observe the impact site for scientific purposes".

None of the spacecraft already orbiting the Moon were positioned to capture the crash live, so the first job for scientists now is to compare before-and-after pictures of the surface to spot a new impact crater.

BBC Science correspondent Pallab Ghosh says: "South Korea's Danuri orbiter had the best chance of catching something close to real time, having passed near the impact site shortly beforehand, but its team has told Korean news outlets that any footage will only be released once analysis by research institutes is complete, with no fixed date given.

"Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will be in position to photograph the site over the coming days.

"Meanwhile, ground telescopes in the Americas, where it was still dark, had the best shot at catching the brief flash and dust plume," says Pallab.

Adding that "cleaned-up images typically takes hours, and sometimes days, as scientists check the data for accuracy".

The object is the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 is a reusable, two-stage rocket designed and manufactured for, what the company calls "the reliable and safe transport of people and payloads into Earth orbit and beyond".

Rockets are often built in sections, called stages. The first stage gives the rocket its first big push away from Earth. The upper stage then helps send spacecraft farther into space.

This upper stage launched in January 2025, carrying two robotic Moon landers.

Part of the Falcon 9 is reusable and designed to return back to Earth for its next mission. But some parts of the rocket are shed in space and remain there.

The part of the rocket that hit the Moon was left in a long looping orbit around Earth.

That orbit carried it far out into the area where the Moon's gravity changed its path, eventually pulling it towards a course that saw it smash onto the lunar surface.

Speaking to the BBC, Dr Matt Bothwell, astronomer at the University of Cambridge said the crash is a "nice little neat experiment on the Moon", but warns that space is becoming more crowded with space debris - human-made objects orbiting around the Earth.

"It could feasibly be within a few decades hard to get past Earth's orbit because space is so crowded," he says.