Photo: Klaus Stebani / Pixabay
After years of traveling through deep space, a suspected leftover piece of a Chinese rocket crashed into the Moon today, just as space tracking experts expected.
The Huge Piece of Garbage space must have hit the far side of the Moon around 7: 54 am ET this morning, as long as the law of gravity has not changed.
Experts warned that it may take weeks, even months, confirm the impact through satellite images that show the new crater on the hidden side of the Moon , according to CBS News and The Associated Press.
The collision ends the life of the rocket in space and probably leaves a new crater on the Moon that may have up to 65 feet wide.
The rocket fragment traveling at the speed of 5,800 mph has caused quite a stir last month. The vehicle was never intended to crash into the Moon in the first place, making it a rare piece of space debris that finds its way to the lunar surface by accident.
There was also some confusion about where it came from, with various groups trying to pin down exactly where the piece of rocket came from.
Originally, space crawlers thought it was a leftover part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that had launched a weather satellite in 2014.
But after careful analysis, several groups of space crawlers confirmed that the rocket was probably a remnant from the Chinese Chang’e 5 mission launch. -T1, a flight that was launched in 2014 to test the technology needed to bring back samples from the Moon.
China tried to deny that the three tons of rocket belonged to the country’s space program, claiming that the rocket actually returned to our planet and fell to the atmosphere.
But there were two Chinese missions with similar designations: the test flight and lunar sample return mission of 2015, and the observers Americans believe the two are being confused.
The fall of this rocket fragment was first predicted by Bill Gray, an astronomer and tracker director of the Pluto Project, which has been following the piece of rocket very closely for the past few months.
The US Space Command, which tracks space debris in low orbits, confirmed on Tuesday that the Chinese upper stage of the lunar mission of 2014 never left orbit, as previously indicated in its database. But could not confirm the country of origin of the object that has hit the Moon.
Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics supports Gray’s revised assessment, but notes: “The effect will be the same. It will leave another small crater on the moon”.
Specialists have used this episode as a case of why we need better plans to remove our debris from deep space1775765 and why we need tracking down space junk that goes to extra high altitudes like this.
But now that the rocket has impacted, its debris could be excellent for study.
The team behind NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which is currently orbiting the Moon, says that they will try to see the aftermath of the accident if they can . Gray predicted that the rocket likely hit the Moon in a far-side crater called Hertzsprung.
Hopefully, maybe the LRO team can find the new crater and give us a picture of the final resting place of the Long March rocket 3C, and maybe we can use all this testing as an opportunity to see what kind of materials the collision might have unearthed on the far side of the Moon.
DoD global Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sensors track more than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris, or “space junk”. Much more debris, too small to be tracked but large enough to threaten human spaceflight and robotic missions, they exist in the near-Earth space environment, according to NASA.