Crash Landing on You: A piece of manmade space junk will collide with the moon next month
A big chunk of rocket debris will be hitting the moon head-on next month.
The Weather Network reported on Tuesday that the Earth’s beloved and only moon is about to get thrashed by the remains of a rocket launched in China eight years ago.
In October 2014, Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern China launched the rocket in order to get lunar samples. The rocket split into three parts, and the last one was aimed for the moon as part of its mission.
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Astronomers scanning the skies saw an object passing by, and after calculating its dimensions and trajectory, they identified it as WE0913A, the piece of the rocket last identified in 2015.
The rocket booster that is going to impact the Moon on March 4 is from the Chang’e 5-T1 lunar mission, not DSCOVR.
GIF: https://t.co/AbEiejPB9Z pic.twitter.com/Aw5D1RsHO8ā Tony Dunn (@tony873004) February 13, 2022
“After whizzing around the Earth-Moon system for over six and a half years, it was finally picked up again,” reported The Weather Network.
The object almost collided with the moon on January 5, before it set off to lap around the Earth-moon system twice. Now it’ll destroy itself in a dramatic fashion.
“A follow-up encounter in February causes another deviation in its orbit, and as a result, it collides with the Moon in early March,” said the weather agency.
“Rocket hardware often does strange things in its early days in space, with leftover fuel leaking out and pushing it around,” said American astronomer Bill Gray. He identified the object as WE0913A, only after first misidentifying it as another piece of DSCOVR, the observational SpaceX satellite launched in early 2015.
Gray’s calculations predict that the object will impact the moon’s surface at 7:25 am on Friday, March 4.
Unfortunately, we won’t get to see the moon getting slammed, as the collision will happen on the other side of the heavenly body.