last January, He said the upper stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket would hit the moon sometime in early March. As you might expect, anticipation is releasing waves Most criticized Elon Musk and his private space company. After all, the event is A rare misstep for SpaceX.
But it turns out that Elon and his men don’t want to lose face. Instead, fate will likely befall China. That’s because Gray is now saying he made a mistake in the initial identification of the piece of space debris that he and other astronomers call it. WE0913A in 2015.
When Gray and his colleagues first discovered the object, some clues led them to believe it was the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket carrying the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Deep orbiting satellite in the same year. The object’s identification might not have been reported in the mainstream media if astronomers had not later discovered that the object was about to collide with the moon.
Gray said inside Posted on Saturday that looks . “I have very good circumstantial evidence for identification, but nothing conclusive,” Gray added. “This is completely unusual. Identification of high-flying space debris often requires a bit of investigative work, and sometimes, we never find an identifier for a bit of space junk.”
We may never have known the true identity of the wreck had it not been for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers . Call Gray on Saturday to inquire about identification. According to Georgini, NASA’s Horizons system, a It can estimate the locations and orbits of nearly half a million celestial bodies in our solar system, indicating that the DSCOVR spacecraft’s trajectory never approached the Moon. Thus, it is not uncommon for the second stage to deviate from its path and collide with the satellite. Georgy Gray’s email prompted him to double-check the data he used for initial identification.
Gray said he was now pretty sure the rocket that was about to hit the moon belonged to China. In October 2014, the country’s space agency launched Chang’e 5-T1 Mission on the Long March 3C rocket. After reconstructing the possible paths for the mission, it was found that Long March 3C is best suited for a mysterious object about to collide with Earth’s natural satellite. “Restarting the orbit for the launch of the Chinese spacecraft is very logical,” he said. . “It ended with an orbit that passed the Moon just in time after launch.”
Gray went to say edge which one Episodes like these underscore the need for more information about rocket boosters traveling into space. “The only people I know who notice these old rocket boosters are the asteroid tracking community,” he told the outlet. “This kind of thing would be a lot easier if people were launching spaceships — if there was a regulatory environment where they had to report something.”
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