Pecohub Scientists expect valuable data to emerge when part of a discarded SpaceX rocket slams into the moon early Wednesday.
The space junk comes from the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket that launched a pair of lunar landers back in 2025 before the spacecraft was abandoned.
The rocket component, weighing thousands of pounds, will be traveling at 5,400 miles per hour at the time of impact.
The impact, estimated to occur around 2:30 a.m., will send debris flying into space and is expected to make a crater 90 feet across.
SpaceX did not intentionally target the Moon, but scientists say there is a silver lining to the crash as NASA moves closer to building a base there by 2032.
The collision will provide the opportunity, they say, to observe risk factors that debris could pose to astronauts.
“These sorts of things are going to happen more and more often. And as we have more astronauts on the lunar surface, more lunar infrastructure habitats, for example, we need to understand how much of a risk these impact events actually pose,” Benjamin Fernando, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told ABC News.
This is not the first time an abandoned rocket has gone down on the lunar world. In 2022, a crashing Chinese spacecraft dug out a pair of craters.
Humans on Earth won’t be able to observe Wednesday’s collision with the naked eye, although telescopes might pick up the resulting dust cloud.
