Part of a SpaceX rocket that was launched seven years ago and was abandoned in space after its mission will crash into the moon in March, experts say.
Deployed in 2015, the rocket put a NASA satellite called the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) into orbit.
Since then, the rocket’s second stage, or booster, has been floating in what mathematicians call a chaotic orbit, astronomer Bill Gray told AFP on Wednesday. Gray calculated the new collision course of the space junk with the moon.
Gray said the booster came very close to the moon during a rendezvous in January, changing its orbit.
He’s behind Project Pluto, software that calculates the trajectories of asteroids and other space objects and is used in NASA-funded space observation programs. A week after the rocket stage approached the moon, Gray looked again and concluded that it would crash into the dark side of the moon at speeds in excess of 5,500 mph (9,000 km/h) on March 4.
Gray called on the community of amateur astronomers to join him in observing the booster, and his conclusions were confirmed.
The exact time and location of the impact may be slightly different from his predictions, but it is widely believed that there will be a collision on the moon that day.
“I’ve been tracking this type of junk for about 15 years,” Gray told AFP. “This is the first unintentional lunar impact we’ve ever encountered.”
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Astronomer Jonathan McDowell told AFP that a similar impact could have happened unnoticed.
“In the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, there were at least 50 objects left in deep Earth orbit, just abandoned there. We didn’t track them,” he said.
“Now we’re looking for a few of them…but many of them we didn’t find, so they don’t exist anymore,” he added. “Probably at least a few of them hit the moon by accident, and we just didn’t notice.”
The impact of the 4-ton SpaceX rocket block on the moon will not be visible in real time from Earth.
But it will leave a crater that scientists will be able to observe using spacecraft and satellites (like NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or India’s Chandrayaan-2) to learn more about the moon’s geology information.
Spacecraft have deliberately crashed into the moon before for scientific purposes, such as testing seismometers during the Apollo missions.
In 2009, NASA launched a rocket stage that hurled it toward the moon near the moon’s south pole in search of water.
But most rockets don’t get that far from Earth. SpaceX brings its rocket boosters back into Earth’s atmosphere, so they disintegrate over the ocean. The first stage is recycled and reused.
Gray said there could be more accidental falls to the moon in the future because the U.S. and Chinese space programs, in particular, have left more junk in orbit.
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