Oh, those pesky wayward rocket stages! One is set to crash into the moon on Friday, and scientists around the world will be following it.
There is something Calle the Hertzsprung Crater on the far side of the moon, and that is where the impact is happening. It will be the first time space junk accidentally crashes onto the moon’s surface.
So who’s rocket did this piece of space junk come from? Initially, the culprit was allegedly the upper stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that went into space back in 2015.
After further review, it looks like another problem courtesy of China, specifically the Long March 3C rocket launched eight years ago.
The manager of Project Pluto, Bill Gray, is adamant that the junk is from China.
“There really is no good reason at this point to think the object is anything other than the Chang’e 5-T1 booster; anybody claiming otherwise has a pretty large hill of evidence to overcome.”
The space junk is expected to hit the moon at 5,500 miles per hour. Unfortunately, it won’t be visible from Earth because it will happen on the far side of the moon, which is kind of a bummer, according to Gray.
“If it were observable — which, sadly, it won’t be — you would see a big flash, and dust and disintegrated rocket bits and pebbles and boulders thrown out, some of it for hundreds of kilometers.”
Maybe next time, since there are 26,000 pieces of space junk orbiting Earth larger than a softball, 500,000 pieces floating in space the size of a marble, and 100 million tiny pieces of debris roughly the size of a. Grain of sand.
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