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It launched Firefly's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience toward the Moon in January 2025, then had nowhere to go. Eighteen months later its orbit finally intersects the thing it was aiming at.
to Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:34:32 UTC · ±25s
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There is no braking and nothing to slow it down. The Moon has no atmosphere, so the stage arrives at full orbital speed and stops in about a hundredth of a second, which is why a four-tonne object digs a crater several times its own length.
That puts it right on the Moon's western limb as we see it — the very edge of the disc, where the surface curves away from Earth. Whether the site is turned toward us at all depends on libration, the slow monthly wobble that lets us peek a few degrees around each edge.
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Everything below depends on where you'll be standing at 06:34 UTC on 5 August.
Worth being blunt: this is not a go-outside-and-look event. The flash lasts a fraction of a second, nobody can predict how bright it will be — JPL doesn't even publish a magnitude for this object — and it happens on the very edge of the disc. Professional observatories are attempting it with large instruments and fast cameras, and they may well come away with nothing.
In 2022 the headlines said a Falcon 9 stage was about to hit the Moon. It wasn't. Bill Gray, who first spotted the object, had identified it as the upper stage from the 2015 DSCOVR launch — then worked out he was wrong and said so publicly. The object that actually hit the Moon on 4 March 2022 was a Chinese Chang'e 5-T1 booster.
This one is different, and it's worth being precise about why. Nobody had to guess at its identity: it was tracked from launch, it has a catalogue number, and JPL has fitted its orbit to 78 measurements taken between 2026-06-02 and 2026-07-07. What's uncertain here isn't whatit is — it's the last few seconds of when.
Trajectory from JPL Horizons, refetched every few hours — the predicted time moves by seconds as new tracking data arrives.