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A Falcon 9 rocket, launched from Florida in 2015, will hit the far side of the Moon in five weeks. Scientists around the world are on the lookout.
Exactly where the rocket will hit remains uncertain due to the unpredictable effect of sunlight “pushing” on the rocket.
AFP
The end is near for one of SpaceX’s rockets. After spending almost seven years in space, Falcon 9 is, according to scientists, regarding to collide with the Moon. Launched from Florida in 2015 by Elon Musk’s space company, it was part of the first mission to take place out of Earth orbit, aiming to send a weather satellite on a journey of a million miles, reports The Guardian.
Its mission accomplished, the rocket saw its last stage end up abandoned. It was then condemned, like millions of other waste, to wander in space, without the slightest control. “She didn’t have enough fuel to get back into the Earth’s atmosphere,” meteorologist Eric Berger explained in a recent post on Ars Technica. “So it has been in a somewhat chaotic orbit since February 2015.”
March 4 impact
Bill Gray, who develops software to track space objects, asteroids, minor planets and comets, said Falcon 9’s upper stage will most likely hit the far side of the Moon, near its equator, in five weeks. The data analyst said in a recent blog post that the object “performed a close lunar flyby on January 5 and it will make a definite impact on March 4, 2022.” This will be “the first intentional case of space debris hitting the moon.”
Exactly where the rocket will hit remains uncertain due to the unpredictable effect of sunlight “pushing” on the rocket.
If this kind of collision is unprecedented, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, believes that the impact will not be “very significant”. However, it will allow satellites currently orbiting the Moon to collect valuable observations. Note that in 2009, NASA intentionally crashed a spent rocket stage on the moon for this specific purpose.
(szu)