O SEGUNDO ESTÁGIO DE UM FOGUETE FALCON 9 DA SPACEX IRÁ COLIDIR COM A LUA
Watch the video on YouTube: O SEGUNDO ESTÁGIO DE UM FOGUETE FALCON 9 DA SPACEX IRÁ COLIDIR COM A LUAVideo from the channel SpaceToday about Falcon 9, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 10:30. Language: Portuguese. Video type: News.
What's being announced
The video, broadcast the day before the event, explains that the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9, catalogued as 2025-010D, was due to crash into the Moon on August 5, 2026 at around 06:35 UTC. The impact point was near the Einstein crater, on the visible edge of the lunar disk. At about 2.4 km/s, the impact would open a crater between 17 and 27 meters in diameter.
Context
That stage launched two lunar missions in January 2025: Firefly's Blue Ghost lander and Resilience, from the Japanese company ispace. With no fuel for a controlled reentry, it remained in an eccentric orbit between Earth and the Moon. After about 18 months of gravitational perturbations, it ended up on a collision course. The main prediction comes from astronomer Bill Gray, of Project Pluto. It would be the second unintentional lunar impact of this kind; the previous one occurred in 2022.
What it means
NASA planned to photograph the area before and after with the LRO probe, and the South Korean probe Danuri would also take images. Since the impacting object is known, measuring the resulting crater will help refine impact models. The observation campaigns aren't looking for the impact itself, very difficult to capture, but for the dust plume it raises. The host also stresses the growing concern over space debris in the lunar environment. He laments that there are still no seismometers on the Moon to record the impact's waves and argues for lava tubes as shelter for future settlements.