00:005, 4, 3, 2, 1. Ignition.
00:07Well, in the early hours of Wednesday, August 5th,
00:11a upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket
00:14made an unplanned impact on the lunar surface.
00:16This Falcon 9 upper stage was from a January 2025 launch
00:21that successfully deployed Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 lander
00:25through NASA's CLIPS initiative, or the Commercial Lunar Payload Services.
00:29A combination of solar activity and gravitational forces
00:32actually prompted the unplanned impact.
00:34Journey here in just about a minute and a half.
00:37And once again, there you can see a live view of Blue Ghosts there on your screen.
00:42NASA did not purposely plan to have this upper stage impact the moon.
00:45However, this is not something we're really concerned about.
00:47This is actually a technically accepted and safe method
00:50of disposing of hardware in low lunar orbit.
00:52And in some cases, mission operators actually choose to end their mission
00:56by impacting their hardware on the lunar surface
00:58because it's a predictable and trackable strategy
01:01for end-of-life hardware disposal.
01:04And there you can see, and you also heard the call-out for confirmation
01:08that Blue Ghost is drifting away from Falcon 9's second stage.
01:13This poses absolutely no danger to anyone on Earth
01:16or any hardware on the moon.
01:17And in fact, scientists are eager to study this impact event
01:20as it can help us constrain how to track things like this in the future.
01:23And basically, we can see a bit of a meaning on the moon.
01:24After that, so we're going to see a
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