Late last month, astronomers revealed that on a collision course with the Moon was a section of the Falcon 9 rocket. Experts said this piece of space junk would end up on lunar soil following passing close to seven years of traversing space. Now, following all, the material that will crater our natural satellite came from a Chinese rocket launched in 2014.
At the time, SpaceX was under fire from the media – and even from the ESA, for not handling certain aspects well at launch, such as fuel management.
It’s the fault of the Chinese
About 3 weeks ago, it was reported that astronomers were observing the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket and were increasingly convinced that this piece of space junk would hit the Moon on March 4. At the time, experts say, the impact would take place on the far side of the Moon and would not be visible from Earth.
Besides the curiosity of the event, several agencies and institutions have “condemned” SpaceX for the event. Critics of Elon Musk’s space company have referred to the wrong time to scrap the second stage of its Falcon 9 rocket following the launch of NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, mission in 2015 .
The proper process should have conserved enough fuel to place depleted rocket stages into stable orbits around the Sun. However, everyone was wrong. In fact, a Falcon 9 rocket won’t reach the Moon next month. It will probably be a Chinese rocket.
Long March 3C rocket with Chang’e 5-T1 spacecraft
The piece of scrap metal did not belong to SpaceX
The first information regarding Falcon 9’s impact with the Moon came from Bill Gray, creator of Project Pluto astrometry software, technology used by professional and amateur astronomers around the world to locate near-Earth objects, asteroids , minor planets and comets. .
However, Gray acknowledged the error and posted this statement on its website. According to the software’s creator, in 2015 Gray and other observers found an unidentified object in the sky and gave it a temporary name, WE0913A.
Further sightings suggested it was likely a man-made object, and soon the second stage of the rocket used to launch DSCOVR emerged as the prime candidate.
I thought it was DSCOVR or related hardware. Further data confirmed that yes, WE0913A had passed the moon two days following DSCOVR launch, and I and others have accepted the identification with the second stage as correct. The object had the brightness we expected and appeared at the expected time and moving in a reasonable orbit.
Gray explained on Saturday.
Of course, with such an “incident” in play, it rang bells around the world, from media to astronomy. After all, it was equipment from SpaceX, a company owned by world-famous Elon Musk.
A watchful eye detected it was not a Falcon 9 stage
After this event was made public, an engineer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jon Giorgini, paid some attention and realized that this object was not in fact the upper stage of a rocket. Falcon 9. Giorgini wrote to Gray on Saturday morning and explained that the trajectory of the DSCOVR spacecraft did not come particularly close to the Moon, so it would be a little odd for the second stage to come close enough for the to touch.
This prompted Gray to research his data and identify other potential candidates.
One of his first suspicions fell on the Chinese Chang’e 5-T1 mission launched in October 2014 on a Long March 3C rocket. This lunar mission sent a small spacecraft to the Moon as a pre-test for a possible lunar sample return mission.
The launch time and lunar trajectory almost exactly match the orbit of the object that will hit the Moon in March.
