It was reported that the wreckage of a rocket likely to collide with the moon on the 4th of next month was launched by China, contrary to what was previously known. SpaceX, which was initially known as the wreckage of the Falcon 9 rocket and was criticized as ‘space garbage’, has yet to respond.
According to Ars Technica, an American IT media, Bill Gray, who first suggested the possibility of a SpaceX rocket crashing to the moon, said on his website on the 12th that his first prediction was wrong and pointed to China’s ‘Changjing-3C’ rocket once more. did.
Bill Gray is an engineer who developed ‘Project Pluto’, a software that tracks objects close to Earth. On the 21st of last month, he said, “The wreckage of a 4 ton Falcon 9 rocket is expected to collide on the far side of the moon on March 4 (local time), leaving behind a 20-meter crater.”
Afterwards, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) questioned the first announcement, and Gray looked once more at the possibility that it might be the wreckage of a rocket other than the Falcon 9.
As a result, it turned out that the rocket that collides with the moon next month is a booster of the Chang’e rocket used by China to launch the ‘Chang’e-5-T1’ spacecraft in October 2014.
Gray revised the announcement, saying, “The object that will collide with the moon is definitely a Chinese rocket.
Although the prediction of a lunar impact from human-launched rocket debris was a wake-up call to space debris, a NASA spokesperson previously said in an earlier interview with AFP that it was “a unique event that might provide an interesting research opportunity.”
It is difficult to observe the moon collision scene in real time. However, NASA expects to be able to obtain more information regarding the Moon by comparing and analyzing images before and following the crater (crater) created by the collision of rocket debris in the future.
Reporter Min-ha Yang (mh.yang@etnews.com), Electronic Newspaper Internet
