SpaceX rocket to crash into the moon | 9 News Australia

It's not quite the lunar landing Elon Musk had in mind, but just over an hour ago, part of a SpaceX rocket crashed into the moon. It wasn't intentional and it's left quite the mark, with experts saying the moon's surface has been altered forever. Elon Musk shot for the stars but smacked the moon. Musk's SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched in January last year from Florida, carrying two private lunar landers. Blue Ghost is drifting away from Falcon 9's second stage. And while Falcon 9's booster returned to Earth, solar activity sent another component adrift and on a collision course with the moon. We're around a crater called Einstein Crater, which is right here on the moon. But far from fearful, researchers were cheering. So it's a great opportunity to do a controlled, somewhat controlled physics experiment. Scientists predict the impact sent lunar dust as high as 75 kilometres. Inside the cloud, potential clues from beneath the moon's surface. It'll be illuminated by the sunlight that gets scattered back to the Earth. The upper stage of the Falcon 9 weighs around four tonnes. That's about the weight of an adult African elephant. It hit the surface of the moon at an estimated speed of 8,700 kilometres an hour, or close to 2.5 kilometres a second, creating a crater estimated to be five metres deep and up to 30 metres in diameter. In terms of scale, this will give you some perspective. Imagine that this green apple is the moon. That rocket component wasn't even the size of a grain of sand when it slammed into the surface. That explains why no one was pressing the panic button. NASA's deliberately crashed spacecraft onto the lunar surface before, but this is just the second time a man-made object has hit the moon by accident. The last was in 2022 when a Chinese rocket slammed the far side. Tonight, a new pockmark on a face already riddled with them. But she's still shining. In the United States, Reid Butler, Nine News.