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Washington (AFP) – The announcement caused a stir at the end of January: the second stage of a SpaceX rocket was to crash on the Moon in early March following wandering in space for several years. But the astronomers had actually misidentified their target.
A piece of rocket will indeed hit the Moon on March 4, but contrary to what had been announced, it is not a rocket from the American company, but rather a Chinese launcher, now say the experts.
Now designated: the stage of a Long March rocket that took off in 2014 for a mission named Chang’e 5-T1, as part of the Chinese space agency’s lunar exploration program.
The surprise announcement was made by astronomer Bill Gray, who first identified the future impact, and admitted his mistake this weekend.
This “good faith error” underlines “the problem posed by the lack of proper tracking of these objects in deep space”, for his part estimated on Twitter the astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who pleads for more regulation of space waste. .
The object in question had actually been misidentified several years ago when it was first detected, said Bill Gray, creator of software to calculate the trajectories of asteroids and other objects, used by NASA-funded observation programs.
“The object had the expected brightness, appeared at the expected time, and was moving in a consistent orbit,” he wrote. But “in retrospect, I should have observed some strange things regarding the orbit,” he acknowledged.
He now says he is “convinced” that the object in question “is actually the Chang’e 5-T1 rocket stage”.
This test mission was to prepare the subsequent Chang’e 5 mission, which brought samples of the Moon back to Earth.
The clarification of this misunderstanding was triggered by an e-mail from a NASA employee, said Bill Gray.
The US space agency said in late January that it would attempt to observe the crater that will be formed by the explosion of the object, thanks to its probe currently orbiting the moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
NASA called the event an “exhilarating research opportunity.” Studying the crater formed might indeed make it possible to advance selenology, the scientific study of the Moon.
Rocket stages have been hurled once morest the Moon for scientific purposes in the past, but this is the first unintended collision detected.
© 2022 AFP
