the moon About to collapse with three tons of space debris, a punch that would punch through a crater that would fit several semi-trucks.
The remaining rocket will slam into the far side of the moon at 5,800 mph (9,300 kph) on Friday, out of the prying eyes of telescopes. It can take weeks, even months, to confirm the effect with satellite images.
Experts believe that it has been rolling randomly through space ever since. China He released it almost a decade ago. But Chinese officials doubt that this is his.
Regardless of who it is, scientists predict the object will dig a hole 33 to 66 feet (10 to 20 meters) wide and send moondust flying hundreds of miles (kilometers) across the barren, blistered surface.
It’s relatively easy to keep track of space debris in low orbit. Exploding objects in deep space are unlikely to collide with anything, and these distant pieces are usually forgotten, except by some observers who enjoy playing celestial detective.
SpaceX originally took a rap for the upcoming lunar debris after the Bill Gray asteroid tracker set its collision course in January. He corrected himself a month later, saying the “mysterious” object was not a SpaceX Falcon rocket on the upper stage of NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory launch in 2015.
Gray said it may have been the third stage of a Chinese rocket that sent a test sample capsule to the moon and back in 2014. But Chinese ministry officials said the upper stage re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and burned up.
But there have been two Chinese missions with similar names: the test flight and the 2020 return-to-the-moon mission, and US observers believe the two are getting confused.
The US Space Command, which tracks low-altitude space debris, confirmed on Tuesday that China’s upper stage of the 2014 lunar mission was never deorbited, as previously described in its database. But he couldn’t confirm the country of origin of the thing that was about to hit the moon.
“We are focused on things closer to Earth,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.
Gray, the mathematician and physicist, said he was now sure it was China’s missile.
“I have become a little more careful about these matters,” he said. “But I really don’t see any way that anything else could be.”
Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics supports Gray’s revised assessment, but notes: “The effect will be the same. You’ll leave another little crater on the moon.”
The moon already has countless craters, reaching 2,500 km (1,600 miles). With little to no real atmosphere, the Moon is defenseless against a constant barrage of meteorites and asteroids, and the occasional approaching spacecraft, including some that deliberately crashed for the sake of science. No weather, no wear and tear and therefore impact wells last forever.
China has a lunar lander on the far side of the moon, but it will be too far north of the equator to detect Friday’s impact. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will also be out of range. India, which orbits the moon Chandrayaan-2, is unlikely to pass by then.
“I was expecting something [significant] To hit the moon for a long time. Ideally, it would have hit the near side of the moon at some point where we can see it,” Gray said.
Pinning the next hit on Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Gray took another look after an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory disputed his claim. Now, he is “fully convinced” that it is a part of a Chinese rocket, based not only on orbital tracking for its 2014 launch, but also on data received from the short-lived amateur radio experiment.
The JPL Center for Near-Earth Object Studies supports Gray’s reevaluation. A team from the University of Arizona recently identified a segment of a Chinese Long March rocket from light reflected off its skin, during telescopic observations of the deflector cylinder.
It is approximately 40 feet (12 m) long and 10 feet (3 m) in diameter, and comes every two to three minutes.
Gray said that SpaceX never contacted him to dispute his original claim. Neither do the Chinese.
“It’s not a SpaceX problem, nor is it a China problem. Nobody particularly cares what they do with the junk in this kind of orbit,” Gray said.
According to McDowell, tracking down the remains of a deep space mission like this is tricky. The moon’s gravity can change the path of an object during flight, creating uncertainty. McDowell noted that there is no readily available database, except for those “pooled” by himself, Gray, and a couple of other people.
“We’re now in an era where a lot of states and private companies are putting stuff into deep space, so it’s time to start tracking it,” McDowell said. “At the moment there is no one, just a few fans in their spare time.”
