Click for next articleA portion of the moon captured by the Artemis II crew during their ten-day mission in April 2026. On Aug. 5, Earth's moon is due for a human-made, high-speed impact from an identified flying object: a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage. That Falcon 9 upper stage is a leftover from the launch that sent Firefly's Blue Ghost-1 lander to the moon on Jan. 15, 2025. And according to a new study by an international team published on the open-source arXiv server, the resulting impact plume may briefly be bright enough to see against the dark sky near the moon's edge. "Our calculations suggest the plume should be several orders of magnitude brighter than the dark-sky background for the first few minutes after impact," Jo told Space.com.