NASA and SpaceX are tracking a spent Falcon 9 rocket stage that is set to crash into the moon on Wednesday, more than a year after it helped launch a lunar lander.

The upper stage lifted off on Jan. 15, 2025, carrying Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lander to the moon under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. After deploying its payload, the spent stage stayed in space, and solar activity combined with gravitational forces gradually pulled it back toward the moon.

The rocket body is expected to strike the lunar surface near the Einstein and Bell craters at roughly 5,400 miles per hour, or about seven times the speed of sound, according to NASA and multiple outlets tracking the impact.

Scientists expect the collision to carve out a crater dozens of feet wide, throwing dust and rock outward as ejecta. NASA said the impact poses no danger to Earth, and it will not be visible to the naked eye, though skywatchers with strong telescopes or binoculars may catch a glimpse of the debris plume.

The agency is treating the impact as a scientific opportunity rather than a hazard. South Korea’s Danuri, formally the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, will attempt to photograph the rocket stage before it hits, while NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will survey the impact site afterward to study the resulting crater.

Researchers say tracking uncontrolled objects like this rocket stage helps refine techniques for monitoring debris in cislunar space, an area of growing interest as more countries and private companies launch missions toward the moon.

This is not the first time a spent rocket stage has ended up on a collision course with the moon. Space agencies have increasingly had to account for aging hardware left in deep space as lunar traffic increases, and Wednesday‘s impact will give scientists another data point on how such objects behave over time.