{"id":42314,"date":"2026-08-03T19:00:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T23:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=42314"},"modified":"2026-08-03T19:00:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T23:00:16","slug":"there-might-be-something-to-see","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2026\/08\/there-might-be-something-to-see\/","title":{"rendered":"There might<\/em> be something to see"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This news has been kicking around for a few days, but recent observations have narrowed down the time it might occur fairly tightly now:<\/strong> At 06:35:42.45 UTC, Wednesday August 5th<\/sup>, the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket (SpaceX) will impact the moon, just barely into the visible side. While this might<\/em> present a visible flash, it is more likely to produce an expanding dust cloud that will have higher visibility because it’s so close to the edge, expanding outward from the curve of the moon rather than across the middle of it where we would be unlikely to see anything at all.<\/p>\n

This time translates to 2:35 AM Eastern Daylight Time for the east coast of the US, specifically to 42.45 seconds past that time – adjustments should be made for other time zones. There’s a little bit of uncertainty because the stage is tumbling and this can affect its path slightly, but only slightly. The impact will occur within seconds of that time, and mere kilometers of the predicted location. You can go here<\/a> for a map of the impact zone, and here<\/a> for the further observations that refined the times.<\/p>\n

While there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ impactor, this upper stage is relatively small and not moving very fast compared to most of the asteroids that we’d be tracking, and certainly meteors that we’d be concerned about with the Earth. This is why a visible flash is unlikely;<\/strong> as the first link says, we’d tracked a previous impactor that was much larger and slammed into a shadowed portion of the moon in plain sight, and we never witnessed a thing (“we” being “not me,” certainly, referring instead to astronomers with proper and powerful telescopes.) This hitting the sunlit side, especially as close to the edge as it is, isn’t likely to show a damn thing, and the crater might be smaller than an average house in footprint. However, it will stir up dust that may<\/em> become visible outside the edge (‘limb’) of the moon, though probably very dimly – your better bet is to scour the search engines the next day to see if anyone with real equipment caught anything. I intend to make the attempt to see\/photograph something personally, though my equipment isn’t as powerful as a proper telescope and astronomical camera, so I’m not holding out much expectation. The weather report is also calling for a better than 60% chance of cloud cover, so even seeing the moon will be lucky enough.<\/p>\n

Some stages are intentionally aimed to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere – because it has<\/em> an atmosphere, such stuff usually burns up or breaks in much smaller pieces when it does so, and it’s not particularly hard to aim them for open ocean where any danger is infinitesimal. The moon has no atmosphere and so the impact will not be slowed by such, and the stage will hit fully intact.<\/p>\n

We tend to think in straight lines and direct paths, which is entirely wrong when talking about objects in space and potential impacts. Nearly everything up there is in orbit around the sun, including what we’ve launched, and only intersects other objects obliquely, crossing paths at shallow angles. This particular object has been orbiting in the immediate vicinity since its launch last year, and repeated observations by those who track asteroids have turned up its impact path. It could, with just a minor boost, have been sent out of range of both the moon and Earth and simply maintained an orbit around the sun (like we do, but farther away from us.) There are no regulations like this for anything launched into space, but given the huge number of objects now up there, there should be, most especially ways to safely de-orbit satellites once they’re past their effective life, but also to either de-orbit or greatly extend the orbit of ‘junk’ like this, the leftover trash of a launch that does absolutely nothing but stands a chance of intersecting with something that does. Such intersections (read:<\/strong> “collisions”) increase the risk of damage to other orbiting objects because the debris cloud has no place to fall or settle, and will continue expanding in unpredictable ways, potentially crossing over into orbit paths outside of the origin. This has already happened<\/a>, and will happen again (you should definitely check out that link) – the risk is steadily increasing, and some of these collisions will be with satellites that we’d really prefer to keep intact, including things like the two space stations currently orbiting. Anything in orbit is generally moving pretty fast, so the relative impact velocities can be enormous – contacts are far more likely to be catastrophic than casual.<\/p>\n

Most especially, if you have a decent telescope and clear skies, it might be worth being up in the wee hours to see if the rising haze of lunar dust becomes visible. Best of luck if you do, and if I<\/em> capture anything at all, it’ll appear here of course, but don’t count on anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This news has been kicking around for a few days, but recent observations have narrowed down the time it might occur fairly tightly now: At 06:35:42.45 UTC, Wednesday August 5th, the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket (SpaceX) will impact the moon, just barely into the visible side. While this might present a visible […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,3,9,46],"tags":[8828,8732,8826,8731,8827],"class_list":["post-42314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-photo","category-science","category-too-cool","tag-dust-cloud","tag-falcon-9","tag-lunar-impact","tag-spacex","tag-upper-stage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42314"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42318,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42314\/revisions\/42318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}