There's a real-world NASA Easter egg hidden on Destiny 2's Moon

(Image credit: Arizona State University)

Yesterday's launch of Destiny 2 on Steam and the rollout of the Shadowkeep expansion really seemed to be going well, until the wheels came off in a very sudden and spectacular fashion. But Bungie sounded the all-clear last night, and players are now free to move about the Lunar surface—and to go in search of a pretty cool NASA Easter egg while they're there.

In the year 2021, as explained by Mashable, the Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper—LunaH-Map—is scheduled to go to the Moon, along with 12 other "CubeSats," to search for the presence of water ice. Once the job is done, the satellite will crash somewhere in the area of the Moon's South Pole. That location just happens to be part of the new Moon location in the Shadowkeep expansion, and the remains of LunaH-Map are still there.

"As we know, the LunaH-Map spacecraft will crash into the moon at the end of its mission. After laying silent for many centuries, its remains are still there, for Guardians to discover," art lead Rob Adams told the site. "Anyone exploring the Moon will have a chance at stumbling across this curious piece of pre-Golden Age human exploration history."

There's more to this particular Easter egg than the opportunity for a bit of sightseeing. If you find it, you'll be given a sweet new emblem based on the LunaH-Map badge. Alas, Bungie didn't say where the crashed satellite is located, but it's partially exposed and so should be fairly easy to spot if you keep your eyes open, or you can just hit up this Reddit thread if you're more interested in scorin' than explorin'.

Destiny 2 seems to be back where it left off yesterday, and has now slipped a little past 225,000 peak concurrent users on Steam, but some issues still remain. Bungie said that it's continuing to investigate Weasel and Squirrel errors, both of which may be related to having Cyrillic characters in your clan name, tag, motto, description, or Steam nickname, and is also digging into reports of problems with migrations from Battle.net to Steam. If you've run into problems with that, Bungie recommends retrying the migration process here.

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Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.