Photo: YASSER AL-ZAYYAT / AFP / Getty Images
A leftover rocket will crash into the far side of the moon at 5.800 mph on Friday, away from the prying eyes of telescopes. It may take weeks, even months, to confirm the impact via satellite imagery, according to CBS News and The Associated Press.
The 3 tons of Space junk has been tumbling randomly through space, experts believe, ever since China launched a rocket nearly a decade ago. But Chinese officials doubt that it is theirs.
No matter whose it is, Scientists expect the object to bore a hole from 33 to 66 feet wide and send moondust flying hundreds of miles across the barren and eroded surface of Moon.
Space debris in low orbit is relatively easy to track.
Objects launched deeper into space are unlikely to hit anything and these remote pieces are usually soon forgotten except for a handful of observers who enjoy playing celestial detective.
SpaceX originally took the blame for the upcoming lunar debris after asteroid tracker Bill Gray identify the course of the collision in January. Gray corrected himself a month later, saying that the “mysterious” object was not a SpaceX Falcon rocket upper stage
of the launch in 2015 of a deep space climate observatory for NASA.
Gray said that was probably the third stage of a Chinese rocket that sent a test sample capsule to the Moon and returned in 2014.
“In a sense, this is still ‘circumstantial’ evidence. But I would consider it pretty compelling evidence, the kind where the jury would walk out of the courtroom and come back in a few minutes with a conviction,” Gray said.
Chinese ministry officials said the upper stage had re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned up.
But there were two Chinese missions with similar designations: the test flight and the return mission of lunar samples of 2022, and American observers believe the two are being confused.
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 indicated above in its database data. But he could not confirm the country of origin of the object about to 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.”
The moon already has countless craters, ranging up to 1,80 miles .
With little or no real atmosphere, the Moon is defenseless against the constant barrage of meteorites and asteroids, and the occasional approaching spacecraft, including some that intentionally crashed for the sake of science.
Without an atmosphere, there is no erosion, so impact craters last forever.
After initially pinning the next attack on Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Gray looked back after that an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory disputed his claim.
a Chinese rocket, based not only on orbital tracking until liftoff at 2014, but also on data received from his brief ham radio experiment .
JPL’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies re supports Gray’s reassessment. A team from the University of Arizona also recently identified the Chinese Long March rocket segment from light reflected off its paint, during telescopic observations of the shrouded cylinder.
Has about 40 feet long and 03 feet in diameter, and makes a revolution every two or three minutes.
And it is quite possible that none of the satellites currently observing the Moon can capture the impact.
China has a lunar lander on the far side of the Moon, but it will be too far away to detect Friday’s impact just north of the equator. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will also be out of range. And India’s Chandrayaan-2, which orbits the moon, is unlikely to pass by then.
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