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Piece of man-made rocket debris on March 4 will hit the moon.
But it turned out not to be, as stated in a number of previous reports. including The New York TimesElon Musk’s SpaceX, which will be responsible for making a crater on the lunar surface.
Instead, the cause is likely to be a piece of rocket launched by China’s space agency.
Last month, Bill Gray, developer of Project Pluto, an astronomical software package used to calculate the orbits of asteroids and comets, announced that the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is in an orbit that will intersect with the path of the moon. . The rocket launched the Deep Space Climate Observatory for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (DSCOVR) on February 11, 2015.
Mr. Gray had been tracking this rocket piece for years, and in early January, it passed within 6,000 miles of the lunar surface and the moon’s gravity spun it on a path that looked like it might collapse on the next orbit.
Observations made by amateur astronomers as the object passes near Earth have once again confirmed the impending impact inside the Hertzsprung, an ancient crater 315 miles wide.
But an email Saturday from Jon Giorgini, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, changed the story.
Mr. Giorgini runs Horizons, an online database that can generate positions and orbits for about 1.2 million objects in the solar system, including about 200 spacecraft. A Horizons user asked Mr Giorgini how confident he was that the object was part of the DSCOVR rocket. “This prompted me to look into the case,” Mr. Giorgini said.
He determined that the orbit was inconsistent with that of DSCOVR and contacted Mr. Gray.
“My first thought was I’m pretty sure I got it right,” Mr. Gray said on Sunday.
However, about a month after DSCOVR’s launch, he started scavenging his old emails to remind himself when this object was first seen in March 2015.
Almost every new object detected in the sky is an asteroid, and that was the assumption for this object as well. It was named WE0913A.
However, it turned out that WE0913A was orbiting the Earth, not the sun, which raised the possibility that it was something from Earth. Mr. Gray said he thought it might have been part of the rocket that launched DSCOVR. More data confirmed WE0913A had passed the month two days after DSCOVR’s launch, and it seemed to confirm that identification.
Mr. Gray now realizes that his mistake was to think that DSCOVR was launched in a lunar orbit and was to use gravity to return the spacecraft to its final destination, about a million miles from Earth, where the spacecraft provided warnings of incoming solar storms.
However, as Mr. Giorgini noted, DSCOVR was actually launched on a direct path that didn’t cross the moon.
“I really wish we had reviewed this,” said Mr. Gray before releasing the January announcement. “But yes, once Jon Giorgini pointed it out, I really understood that I was wrong.”
SpaceX, which did not respond to a request for comment, never said WE0913A was not a rocket stage. But he probably isn’t watching her either. Often times, a Falcon 9’s second stage is pushed back into the atmosphere to burn up. In this case, the rocket needed all its propellant to get the DSCOVR to its distant target.
However, the unpowered and uncontrolled second stage was in an orbit that would not endanger any satellites, and humans probably did not follow it.
“It would be nice if the people who put these accelerators in high orbits would publicly reveal what they put in there and where they’re going instead of me having to do all this detective work,” said Mr. Gray.
But if that wasn’t the DSCOVR rocket, what was? Mr. Gray focused on those heading towards the moon through other launches in previous months. “There isn’t much in this category,” said Mr. Gray.
The top candidate was the Long March 3C rocket, which launched China’s Chang’e-5 T1 spacecraft on October 23, 2014. This spacecraft orbited the moon and returned to Earth, leaving a small return capsule that landed in Mongolia. This was a test that went to the Chang’e-5 mission in 2020, which successfully collected moon rocks and dust and brought them back to work on Earth.
Taking a computer simulation of WE0913A’s orbit back in time showed that China would make a near-lunar flyby on October 28, five days after launch.
Additionally, Mr Gray said orbital data from a cube satellite attached to the third stage of the Long March rocket was “almost a dead ringer” for WE0913A. “The kind of case you could possibly take to a jury and get a conviction.”
Further observations this month shifted the estimate of when the object would hit the moon by a few seconds and a few miles east. “It still looks like the same thing,” said Christophe Demeautis, an amateur astronomer in northeastern France.
Still no chance of missing the moon.
The collision will occur at 7:26 a.m. Eastern time, but because the impact will be on the far side of the moon, it will not be visible to Earth’s telescopes and satellites.
As for what happened to the Falcon 9 segment, “we’re still trying to figure out where the DSCOVR second stage might be,” said Mr. Gray.
The best guess is that it orbited the sun instead of Earth and could still be there. That would overlook him for now. The return of old rocket parts has precedent: a mysterious object newly discovered in 2020 It turned out to be part of a rocket launched in 1966. For NASA’s robotic Surveyor missions to the moon.
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