Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. Its time is now nearly up. Gray, using data gathered by a variety of fellow observers, calculated that the stage will crash into the moon on March 4 at 7:25 a.m. EST (1225 GMT). The impact will occur on the lunar farside, at about 4.93 degrees north latitude and 233.20 degrees east longitude. "At a guess, the above prediction may be wrong by a degree or two minutes from the predicted time," Gray wrote in a blog post about the coming impact, citing the difficulty of modeling precisely how sunlight pressure moves a tumbling, cylindrical object such as a rocket stage. "We'll need (and I am confident will get) more observations in early February to refine the prediction; that will bring the uncertainty down greatly," he added. Because it will occur on the moon's farside, the impact won't be visible from Earth. But nailing down its time and location is still important, potentially allowing moon-orbiting spacecraft such as NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and India's Chandrayaan 2 to study the resulting crater — "and, if we're lucky, maybe image the impact," Gray wrote. Gray's calculations have been confirmed by others in the know. "For those asking: yes, an old Falcon 9 second stage left in high orbit in 2015 is going to hit the moon on March 4. It's interesting, but not a big deal," astronomer and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote via Twitter on Tuesday (Jan. 25). Objects "left in cislunar orbit are unstable — will eventually either hit the moon or the Earth or get perturbed to solar orbit," he added in another tweet. ("Cislunar" refers to the region between the Earth and moon.) The upcoming impact will be the "first example of a Regolith Unplanned Disassembly if orbital dynamics holds true," SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker tweeted on Monday, invoking the RUD acronym that Musk often uses to describe the destruction — or "rapid unplanned disassembly" — of a rocket during testing here on Earth. Insprucker, who hosts many of SpaceX's launch webcasts, clarified in a subsequent tweet that the upcoming impact will be the first lunar RUD for the company, not the first one overall. Indeed, many spacecraft have slammed into the moon unintentionally over the years. In 2019, for example, Israel's Beresheet probe and the Chandrayaan 2 lander both crashed during their lunar touchdown attempts.