A South Korean spacecraft has returned the first images of the place where a stray SpaceX rocket came down on the moon. The Korea Aerospace Research Institute's Danuri orbiter passed over the impact site shortly after a Falcon 9 upper stage struck the surface on Wednesday, Aug. 5, and the agency published the photographs it brought back a day later. They are the first pictures anyone has of the scene.
Danuri made several passes and shot the site from lunar orbit. The ground reads noticeably darker where the stage came down and dug out a crater, with dust and rock thrown across the terrain around it. Korean space officials said the orbiter gathered views from either side of the event; the earlier half of the comparison they released is a NASA image of the same ground, taken in October 2015.
The stage came off a launch last year that carried a pair of privately built landers to the moon. By SpaceX's account, solar activity and gravity worked it onto a collision course nobody planned, and it arrived at 5,400 mph (8,700 kph). The same company put Danuri itself on its way from Cape Canaveral in 2022. NASA expects its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter over the crash site next week, for a second look at what is left.
The level is IMPACT WINDOW, built for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. It puts the reader in the orbiter's seat for the work the pictures took: three passes over the site, steering with inertia while the ground slides underneath, flipping between the before and the after frame, and scanning the new crater against a clock. The comparison is the whole job — nothing on the screen tells you where the impact is until you have held both frames in your head and found the patch that changed. Play it here in the browser, or download the ROM and run it on real hardware.