It probably won’t be bowl-shaped, like the moon’s most prominent craters, but kind of lumpy around the edges. Wagner expects they’ll see a big splash of material on the landscape, and then, when they zoom in, the shape of the crater itself. Experts will soon go through before-and-after photos of the spot where the rocket hit on the moon’s far side. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured the lunar surface in great detail, including the Apollo landing sites and the things the astronauts left behind more than 50 years ago. And those were planned events NASA dropped the rocket parts to see whether the seismometers that the astronauts had left behind would pick up any vibrations. “We haven’t seen any big things like rocket upper stages hit the moon since the Apollo program,” Robert Wagner, a research specialist at Arizona State University who works on the NASA orbiter’s camera team, told me.
But when someone who worked on that NOAA satellite reached out to Gray with doubts, the astronomer did a deeper analysis, running the object’s trajectory backward in time, and realized that he’d been wrong.Īstronomers will now attempt to find the new crater using observations from two missions, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and India’s Chandrayaan-2, which both loop around the moon. The collision sparked a bunch of news stories because, well, we’re just throwing trash at the moon now, and this trash appeared to have originated with SpaceX and its divisive CEO, Elon Musk. This past January, Gray noticed that the rocket debris was tracing a path directly toward the moon.
#Chinese rocket crash moon update#
There’s that rocket chunk again, they’d say, and update the numbers for its orbital path. Gray and others have kept an eye on it over the years, noting whenever the object popped up in telescope observations of asteroids.
Back then, he believed that it was an abandoned rocket booster from a recent SpaceX launch, which had deployed a satellite mission for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration the orbital data and the timing seemed to line up.
#Chinese rocket crash moon software#
Gray, who is well known in the space community for monitoring objects in orbit-he provided the tracking software that helped pinpoint a space rock that used to orbit Earth like a second moon-first noticed the debris in 2015. But this latest incident appears to be the first of its kind: entirely unplanned. The first spacecraft to ever reach the lunar surface, for example, smashed into it on purpose in 1959 because the Soviet Union was eager to beat the United States to it, even if it meant destroying a probe. But we’ve usually done it for specific reasons, such as national glory or scientific curiosity.
Humankind has actually been chucking stuff at the moon for decades, and not just astronauts. When you think about it that way, we’re kind of throwing trash at the moon. The hardware, no longer useful after a successful launch, was just discarded in space. “It would almost completely cover a basketball court,” Bill Gray, an amateur astronomer who tracks space objects, told me.Īccording to Gray, the space junk turned out to be a discarded rocket booster from a Chinese mission that sent a spacecraft toward the moon in 2014.
Astronomers can’t see the aftermath yet but, based on the size of this thing, they believe that the impact has scooped out a new crater as wide as 20 meters, or 65 feet. The hardware came barreling head-on at the lunar surface at 5,800 miles an hour, into an existing, enormous crater. The debris, a piece of a rocket about the size of a school bus, had been floating in space for seven years. This morning, a piece of space junk smacked right into the far side of the moon. Today, because of human beings and their little space things, Earth’s celestial companion got one more dent. Space rocks are still at it, and every year the bombardment scoops out dozens of craters big enough for moon-orbiting spacecraft to notice. The moon is a wonderland of craters-thousands of them, carved by asteroids hitting the surface over billions of years.
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