Elon Musk is no stranger to global controversies, but commotion that formed in 2022 before a rocket will hit the far side of the Moon has been completely exonerated.
On March 4 of that year, an unidentified rocket crashed on the western edge of the far side of the Moon, creating a double crater 29 meters in diameter on impact. Initially, it was determined to be the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that had launched the DSCOVR mission in 2015.
DSCOVR was SpaceX’s first interplanetary mission. Launched on February 11, 2015, it placed the L1 Lagrange point, more than a million kilometers from Earth, the climate observatory of the same nameoperated by NOAA.
To achieve a successful insertion of DSCOVR, the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket had to reach a record altitude. As a result, ran out of fuel to return to the Earth’s atmosphere and without kinetic energy to escape the gravity of the Earth-Moon system.
In the following years, the rocket followed an erratic trajectory that led astronomers to predict its impact with the Moon. The controversy arose in January 2022, when two renowned American scientists (Bill Graywho wrote the Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, and Jonathan McDowellan astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center) predicted that the second stage of the Falcon 9 would crash into the Moon on March 4, 2022.
Although the calculations were correct (a rocket ended up impacting the far side of the Moon on March 4), the object they were observing had been misidentified. It wasn’t a Falcon 9, but a Chinese rocket stage.
A crater signed by China, not by SpaceX
The crater left by the rocket on the Moon. Image: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
In February 2022, a month before impact, Jon Giorgini of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote to Bill Gray to tell him that the object they were following It was not the DSCOVR mission rocket. NASA had located SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and it was not on a trajectory close to the Moon. So what the hell was that object?
Assuming it was of artificial origin and not natural because it was orbiting the Earth instead of the Sun, Gray reviewed the launches prior to March 2015 until he found one that fit. One fit: the Chinese Chang’e 5-T1 mission.
Chang’e 5-T1 was launched on October 23, 2014 to test a reentry capsule, a precursor to the Chang’e 5 mission of 2020 with which China managed to bring its first samples of lunar soil to Earth.
The object that would impact the far side of the Moon on March 4 was probably 2014-065B, the third stage of a Chinese Long March 3 rocket which had deployed the Chang’e 5-T1 mission capsule seven years earlier.
How could they be sure this time? Jonathan McDowell compared orbital elements of the rocket with a cubesat that had followed the same journey, and the match was very close. However, the upper stages of a rocket can change orbit and do strange things when they have traces of fuel inside, so no one was entirely sure.
Until, at the end of last year, the magazine Planetary Science Journal published a study led by the University of Arizona that corroborated its origin. The researchers analyzed the composition and trajectory of the object and confirmed that it was more like a Chinese rocket than a Falcon 9.
By studying how light had reflected off the surface of the object as it moved through space, the researchers determined that it was a rocket stage of the Chang’e 5-T1 mission and not from a second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, although the Chinese space agency claimed that its launcher had burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere years ago.
According to the study, the object resembled a dumbbell, with two large masses at each end, resulting in the double impact crater. One of the masses was the two 1,090 kilogram engines without fuel, while the other end was what gave the rocket its stability, a support structure or some type of additional instrument. It was the first time astronomers observed a double crater.
Despite the controversy, it was neither the first nor the last time that a human spacecraft has crashed on the Moon. There could even be tardigrades living on the Moonin the unlikely event that they survived the impact of the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft in 2019. Ten years earlier, NASA reached intentionally crashing a rocket into the Moon to study the material that would be thrown out with the explosion. The difference is that NASA didn’t try to hide it from the rest of the world.
Image | SpaceX
In techopiniones | NASA needs some lunar samples collected by China. And for this he will have to break the law