Moon Craters, Rocket Salvage, and Cosmic Scouts: This Week in Space

A 60-foot-wide crater, wider than an NBA basketball court and up to 10 feet deep, now scars the lunar surface after a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage slammed into it on August 5. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured the stark before-and-after images between August 11 and 12, but the shot required precision threading: engineers tilted the orbiter to snap the target as it sped overhead at a mile per second.

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