The Moon is about to be hit this Friday by 3 tons of space junk, a punch that will dig a crater into which several semi-trailers could fit.
The leftover rocket will crash into the far side of the Moon at 9,300 km/h away from the prying eyes of telescopes. It may take weeks, even months, to confirm the impact through satellite images.
Experts believe it has been circling space ever since China launched it nearly a decade ago. But the Chinese authorities doubt that it is his.
Regardless of who it is, scientists expect the object to blast a hole 10 to 20 meters in diameter, sending lunar dust hundreds of kilometers away from the scarred and barren surface.
Celestial detectives on the hunt for space debris
Space debris in low orbit is relatively easy to track. Deeper objects rarely collide with anything, and these distant pieces are often soon forgotten, except by a handful of observers who enjoy playing celestial detective.
SpaceX originally took responsibility for the next lunar brood after the asteroid tracker Bill Gray will identify the course of the collision in January. He corrected himself a month later, saying the “mysterious” object was not an upper stage of SpaceX’s Falcon rocket. of the 2015 launch of a deep space climate observatory for NASA.
Chinese rocket?
Gray said it was likely the third stage of a Chinese rocket that sent a test sample capsule to the moon and back in 2014. But Chinese ministry officials said the upper stage had re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and collapsed. Burned.
But there were two Chinese missions with similar denominations – the 2020 lunar test flight and sample return mission – and US observers think they are getting it wrong.
The US Space Command, which tracks lower space debris, confirmed on Tuesday that the Chinese upper stage of the 2014 lunar mission never went out of orbit, as previously reported in its database. But he could not confirm the country of origin of the object that is about to collide with the Moon.
“We focus on objects closest to Earth,” a spokesman said in a statement.
Gray, a mathematician and physicist, said he is now sure it is China’s rocket. “I’ve become a little more cautious on these issues,” he said. “But I really don’t see how it could be anything else.”
Even so, he clarified: “It is not a problem of SpaceX, nor of China. No one is particularly careful about what they do with the junk in this kind of orbit,” Gray said.
Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics and the Smithsonian supports Gray’s revised assessment, but notes: “The effect will be the same. It will leave another small crater on the Moon.”
Eternal Craters on the Moon
The Moon already has innumerable craters, up to 2,500 kilometers. Having hardly any atmosphere, the Moon is defenseless against the constant bombardment of meteorites and asteroids, and the occasional spacecraft. that arrive, including some that crash intentionally for scientific reasons. With no weather, there is no erosion, so impact craters are eternal.
China has a lunar lander on the far side of the moon, but it will be too far away to detect Friday’s impact north of the equator. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will also be out of range. Nor is it likely that India’s Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft, in lunar orbit, will pass by.
“I had been waiting a long time for something (important) to reach the Moon. Ideally, it would hit the near side of the Moon, at a point where we could see it,” Gray said. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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