Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent
Today’s crash means the Moon now has roughly 3,000 human-made objects, weighing around 190 tonnes combined.
These have built up since the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 became the first spacecraft to reach the lunar surface in September 1959.
NASA’s own tally lists 796 items from its Moon programme alone, mostly left behind by the six Apollo missions; the wider 3,000 figure emerges once you add every other nation and company’s hardware too, from Soviet and Chinese landers to crashed rocket stages like today’s.
Unlike pollution on Earth, this debris poses no threat to an ecosystem, since the Moon has no
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