9/18/2023 0 Comments Falcon 9 rocket moon![]() ![]() The email prompted Gray to dig into his data and look for an alternative explanation for the object. Giorgini pointed out that DSCOVR’s initial trajectory did not pass particularly close to the Moon, and so it was strange that the upper stage Gray was tracking seemed to have gone right past it only two days after launch. That is, until February 12, 2022, when Gray received an email from Jon Giorgini at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). (At least, not identified yet.)”īut the detective work he’d carried out was suggestive enough that he considered it a positive ID for the SpaceX rocket, and no one questioned it. Identifications of high-flying space junk often require a bit of detective work, and sometimes, we never do figure out the ID for a bit of space junk there are a couple of unidentified bits of junk out there. “Essentially,” he wrote, “I had pretty good circumstantial evidence for the identification, but nothing conclusive. ![]() These images were captured on July 16, 2015. ![]() This animation features actual satellite images of the far side of the moon, illuminated by the sun, as it crosses between the DSCOVR spacecraft’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) and telescope, and the Earth – one million miles away. Gray, who manages the near-Earth object tracking software Pluto Project, explained that the erroneous identification of the object as DSCOVR’s upper stage back in 2015 was based on shaky evidence. Instead, it’s a Chinese booster: the upper stage of the rocket that carried China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission to the Moon in 2014. He confirmed that there is indeed a rocket stage on course to crash into the far side of the Moon, but it’s not a SpaceX rocket at all. This week, Gray, who has been tracking the object ever since, released an update on the situation. Its ultimate fate was unknown, until last month, when astronomer Bill Gray predicted that it was bound for an impact with the Moon sometime on March 4 th, 2022. The leftover rocket stage, meanwhile, became a floating piece of space junk orbiting the Sun. The rocket in question carried NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) to the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, where the still-operating observatory provides advance warning on solar wind activities. Last month, astronomers reported that a discarded upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, launched 7 years ago, was on a collision course with the Moon. A high-definition image of the Mars Australe lava plain on the Moon taken by Japan’s Kaguya lunar orbiter in November 2007. ![]()
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